ICE SOLDIERS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Dreadful Canadian 80s Throwback to Straight-to-VHS Action Films

"I'm not quite as stupid as I look. The people who made this movie and gave me a nice fat paycheque are far more stupid than I could ever be.

Ice Soldiers (2013) 1 Pubic Hair - Second Lowest Rating
Dir. Sturla Gunnarson, Starring: Dominic Purcell, Adam Beach, Michael Ironside, Gabriel Hogan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Cuban Missile Crisis is in full swing whilst up in the Canadian Arctic, a bunch of Americans at a military outpost go out onto the Tundra to investigate a mysterious crash. Here they find three gentlemen with identical blonde haircuts who all bear a resemblance to Dolph Lundgren in his prime. They're encased in pods and appear to be dead. The biggest of them (Gabriel Hogan) opens his eyes.

Cut to: The Military outpost. Dolph Lundgren Lookalike #1 (DLL#1) is strapped down in a metal containment area. One of the characters TELLS US how dangerous DLL#1 is. He TELLS US he lost half of his men. He TELLS US they needed to plug several high-power tranquilizers in the Hairless Aryan Beast.

So, a quick question. How then do we know we're watching a Canadian movie? Any thoughts? Give up? Okay, for those dim bulbs out there who can't quite get it, the answer is simple. The movie is set in Canada, with a bunch of Canadian actors playing Americans and there clearly wasn't enough money to actually shoot the spectacular carnage - even though it's the beginning of the movie and you'd probably want to open with a bang, not a whimper. But it's a Canadian movie, so a whimper it will be and instead of seeing the wham-bam, we must be told about it.

Another clue is that the outpost's scientist is a babe-o-licious French gal from La Bell Province. The sultry Quebecois brunette looks sadly upon the blonde, super-ripped, manacled DLL#1 and makes it clear her only interest is his well being. He eyes her lasciviously. Hmmmm.

When the 3 DLLs break free, they kill all the men - quite unspectacularly. After all, this is a Canadian movie pretending to be an American movie and as such, there's no money to deliver-up the goods. Our brunette French gal is spared, but not before being raped off-screen by DLL#1. It has to happen off-screen because - come on, guess! Oh, okay. I'll tell you. It's a Canadian movie and Canadians are far too civilized to put a rape scene up there for all to see. God knows, if they did that, they might also violate the content conditions placed on them to receive taxpayer money to finance a good chunk of the film via tax credits and/or investment.

Up to this point, the movie's pretty much been a washout in the action, suspense and gratuitous rape scene department, but because the film is set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we get to see the soldiers watching a live telecast of JFK during some of the tenser moments with the threat to America from the Russkies. By default, this old news footage wins a Kewpie Doll for being the most suspenseful stuff thus far.

So, let us flash forward 50 years later. A group of soldiers for hire (led by Michael "What the fuck am I doing in this piece of shit?" Ironside) and a Blonde Babe-o-licious scientist are there on behalf of an oil company to do whatever it is they're supposed to do. They have another mission: to assist Malraux (Dominic Purcell) a beefy, BRUNETTE Dolph Lundgren lookalike SCIENTIST from La Belle Province who is there to search for the bodies of the mysterious DLLs who wiped everyone out in the backstory.

At this woeful point, I did the math and frankly, it was of the 1 + 1 = 2 variety. A mysterious dark haired Dolph Lundgren lookalike scientist with a French surname is really interested in finding the three Blonde Dolph Lundgren lookalikes who murdered everyone on the base 50 years earlier and raped (demurely off-screen) the French woman scientist who was brunette and left alive. Add to the equation, a really stupid piece of dialogue where the Blonde Babe scientist states how young looking Dominic Purcell looks and that she expected someone who was 50 years old and voila! The supposedly shocker ending comes about 20 minutes into the movie. (Oh, and anyone who couldn't figure this out by this point is a moron, so you do not have my sympathy for what you might call a "spoiler".)

Okay, the movie is pretty awful by this point anyway, but any hope it would get better was dashed when I realize that the good guy is the biological son of the main bad guy. And yup, the bad guys are superhuman clones developed by the Russkies during the Cold War with a mission to destroy New York City in a terrorist attack and the good guy is the bastard child of one of them and seeks to stop their deadly mission AND get payback for the rape of his mother.

Oh, I kid you not.

The stupidities don't end there. Purcell eventually finds the bodies of the Lundgren Boys all by his lonesome. He knows damn well who they are, but he has them moved to the outpost to do tests on them just to make sure. Good idea. This gives them a chance to break free, kill everyone (boringly and with no genuine action movie flourish) and head to the nearest town (in the fucking Arctic!!!!?????) to kill everyone, including the strippers (in the fucking Arctic? Just around the corner from Santa's workshop????) and hijack a plane to New York. Why these clowns decided to take a rest in the snow and stay frozen for 50 years instead of continuing their mission in the first place is beyond me.

I guess if they did, there wouldn't be a movie. That, however, wouldn't be the stupidest idea I've heard in awhile since there really is no reason for Ice Soldiers to exist. That this film was made takes the prize for that.

Look, a whole lot of nothing happens in this purported movie until the final confrontation. There are a few poorly directed action scenes, a lot of really stupid dialogue, and more anachronisms and inaccuracies than one would find in the absolute worst Grade Z 50s science fiction films. When the final confrontation comes, it's a washout since the film's director has no idea of how to direct action scenes and, in fairness, probably didn't have the budget for it since, one imagines, a good chunk of that change went into someone else's pocket.

On the plus side, there's some fine outdoor photography by one of Canada's best cinematographers Stephen Reizes. If there'd been something resembling a script and a director, this could have been a decent low-budget action thriller. (His individual shots during the action scenes are fine - what goes on in them and how lamely they're cut is the problem.)

I'm a great actor, but a paycheque
is a paycheque, even if I have to
play a stereotypical Aboriginal
trapper who guides the hero
through an Arctic forest
above the tree line.

I certainly hope the great actor Adam Beach got a good chunk of change for wasting his life doing this picture. He's a breath of fresh air in the last half hour, to be sure, but alas, he is saddled with the role of an offensively stereotypical Aboriginal Cree trapper (in the Arctic!!!!!?????) with a booze problem.

He's also skilled in the ways of the Arctic. Even though there are no trees in the Arctic, he manages to guide Dominic Purcell through a thick forest to find the bad guy.

Our movie draws to a close with Adam Beach setting up a Native funeral pyre as he and Purcell watch the Dolph Lundgren lookalikes burn until Purcell utters the knee-slappingly hilarious lines:

"He was my Father! He raped my Mother!"

These are lines worthy only of a screenwriter who penned dumb dialogue for the real Dolph Lundgren. Oh, mercy me! That's the case. Screenwriter Jonathan Tydor wrote the crappy 1990 Dolph Lundgren movie I Come in Peace.

Oy! Only a Canadian would be pathetic enough to shake the dust off someone like Tydor to write a script for their movie. About the only thing that can really be said in this picture's favour is that it's better than Passchendaele, the worst Canadian movie of all time.

Ice Soldiers is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from levelFilm.

NOW HERE'S THE GOOD NEWS, I HAVE ON OFFER, ONE FREE DVD COPY OF ICE SOLDIERS TO THE FIRST PERSON WHO SENDS IN THEIR ANSWER TO THE FOLLOWING TRIVIA QUESTION. IN ICE SOLDIERS, THERE IS A LAME CROSSING THE ICE FLOE SUSPENSE SCENE. NAME THE DIRECTOR AND TITLE OF THE FAMOUS SILENT MOVIE FROM BIOGRAPH PICTURES THAT HAS SUCH A SCENE AND NAME THE DIRECTOR AND TITLE OF THE RUSSIAN FILM WHICH FEATURES A BATTLE SCENE ON ICE FLOES. SEND YOUR ANSWERS TO klymkiwfilmcornerATyahooDOTca AND IF YOU HAVE THE CORRECT ANSWER FIRST, YOU WILL WIN!!!!

THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Decimation of Peter Jackson

Do any hobbits wish to clog dance?

The happy folk of the Shire need to kill a dragon, but will they? "By the big toe of Bilbo Baggins," you ask, "Will they?" Well, all I'm willing to say is it's going to take you 281 minutes to find out.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) 1 PUBIC HAIR

Dir. Peter Jackson
Starring: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Orlando Bloom

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I don't care how much money this or the other Hobbit movies make - suckers are born every minute - but I used to have something resembling admiration for Peter Jackson as a filmmaker. As if The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey wasn't bad enough, but part two of this dull, convoluted, interminable saga is beyond the pale. While it is thankfully bereft of the endless Hobbit clog dancing, mead guzzling and fiddle playing that permeated the first instalment of this folly, it now, sadly, has nothing going for it at all, save for dull roller coaster rides that we're forced to yawn our way through as there's little else to pay attention to.

Even worse, is that Jackson and his cohorts have gone out of their way to tamper with J.R.R. Tolkien's book in some unbelievably stupid ways. Now, let it be said, I have very little use for Tolkien, but "The Hobbit" was, at the very least, a relatively slender volume with an emphasis upon magic more than mayhem. However, this distended-stomach of a movie goes out of its way to concoct as many opportunities as possible to shoehorn in a ludicrous number of action and chase scenes to showcase the derring-do via the inexplicably ugly accelerated 48-frame-rate digital so that the usually crappy digital 3-D is even crappier.

Characters and events are concocted - not just for the aforementioned reasons - but to idiotically tie-in these new films with the Lord of the Rings trilogy so that watching all six back-to-back will yield a full epic a la the George Lucas Star Wars saga.

It's almost impossible to assess any aspect of this film properly since it, its predecessor and, no doubt, the final instalment have no real reason to exist in this idiotic form. Yes, the entire cast acquits themselves as best as one could hope for and there are design elements - mostly with the various monsters - that are in and of themselves kind of cool, but finally, all I can ask is, "For what?"

On a number of fronts, Jackson had already created a fine legacy for himself with virtually every film he's made, but so far, the woeful trilogy seems at best, little more than a cynically calculated cash grab and at worst, a pompous, misguided attempt to rewrite Tolkien so The Hobbit can flow more naturally into The Lord of the Rings. Chances are pretty good that if Tolkien had wanted to do so, he'd have bloody well done it.

What remains, finally, is little more than the image of a spluttering dunderhead jamming square pegs into round holes and getting millions of likeminded brain-bereft audiences to pay for it and cheer him on in the process.

"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" is playing everywhere.

SHARKNADO - Review By Greg Klymkiw - ALL HAIL "SHARKNADO" FOR MERELY EXISTING

Sharknado (2013) 1 PUBIC HAIR
Dir. Anthony C. Ferrante
Starring: John Heard, Tara Reid and a bunch of other people who appear to have acted in movies and television that nobody in their right mind will have even heard of, much less seen.

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A huge humdinger of a Hurricane-Katrina-like whirlwind is no common-variety tempest in a teapot. It results in mega tornados capturing every shark on the Pacific Coast and depositing thousands of the munchie-crazed-bastards in Lotus Land. A handful of non-characters become the film's prime focus as they battle the CGI threat of a lifetime. We watch, open-mouthed. as the most horrendous computer-generated sharks shoot out of the raging twisters to fill Sunset Boulevard - and they sure a shootin' are not looking to eat at Taco Bell. Nothing less than the human species will do for the main course.

That's it. No more. No less. Nothing else.

This utterly horrendous made-for-SYFY movie (which aired in Canada on SPACE) doesn't even have the distinction of being laughably awful. What it has in its favour is that it exists. The other thing in its favour is that, as stupid as the idea is, it's actually a pretty fun idea for what might have been a watchable, borderline surreal B-movie. I wish it were so, but the writing is abysmal, there's nothing remotely funny about it and the only thing that keeps you watching is to see how long your jaw will stay dropped at just how horrendous it actually is.

One of the more depressing elements of the movie is seeing the offbeat 70s/80s actor John Heard embarrass himself in the role of a drunk (a la Walter Matthau's similar cameo in Earthquake). Heard was never going to be anyone's idea of a big star and his bland qualities suggested he'd never be, uh, heard from, ever again. Still, he made a reasonable impression in movies like Paul Schrader's The Cat People, Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, as Jack Kerouac in the kind of strange, kind of cool John Byrum-directed Beat Generation biopic Heart Beat and Joan Micklin Silver's Chilly Scenes of Winter. Watching him humiliate himself here for a paycheque can't even inspire me to crack a good joke or two at his expense.

Watching the movie, I just kept wondering why SYFY doesn't even try to make good movies. They don't have to be anything other than crap, but there's no reason why they can't be good crap?

The movie looks as good as it's ever going to look on Blu-Ray and the technology is so indelible in its image quality that it serves to make the special effects actually look worse than they are.

Still, I have to admit that I not only looked forward to watching it, but as I screened the picture, I could not take my eyes off it. I was never bored and managed to make it all the way through rather painlessly. This is hardly a ringing endorsement, but even from a dyed-in-the-wool genre freak like me, that's about the biggest endorsement I'll be able to bestow upon it.

Here's a nice quote I'm happy to offer for some future home entertainment release box art:

"I sat all the way through Sharknado and I'm embarrassed to admit it didn't bore me."

"Sharknado" is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from VSC - Video Service Corp.

WORLD WAR Z - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 1 Pubic Hair: Lowest Rating To WORST ZOMBIE MOVIE OF ALL TIME!

World War Z (2013) 1 PUBIC HAIR
Dir. Marc Forster
Starring: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Broken Record Alert: Yup, I'll cut to the chase. You've heard my complaints on the following failings in modern genre films before and, damn it, you're going to hear them again whether you like them or not. Before I do, allow me to proclaim the following:

World War Z is the worst zombie movie ever made.

Amongst a litany of complaints, the worst I can level is that it's so visually inept, they might well have secured the directorial services of Blind Pew.

Once again, a gargantuan budget has been afforded to a filmmaker (I'm using this term loosely here) who has absolutely NO TALENT for directing suspense and action. Marc Forster is the director who delivered Halle Berry her token Oscar win in the dreary Monster's Ball, puked up the lame pseudo-Masterpiece-Theatre-styled J.M. Barrie biopic Finding Neverland, crapped out the non-thrilling thriller Stay and performed a miraculous sleepwalk whilst directing the mediocre (but could have been a great picture if a real director had been at the helm) The Kite Runner.

All of these movies had varying degrees of critical and/or awards success as well as a veneer of dull respectability that idiotically convinced the James Bond producers to hire Forster for the wretched followup to the terrific Daniel Craig reboot picture Casino Royale. Quantum of Solace, was not only a dour downer, but featured the worst action set pieces in any James Bond movie ever made (and was only matched by the recent Sam Mendes blood-flecked turd Skyfall). The talentless Forster followed his Bond abortion up with the brutal, stupid pseudo-arty action item Machine Gun Preacher.

World War Z stars Brad Pitt as a former United Nations undercover operative who is forced back into the line of duty when a virus quickly transforms most of the world's population into zombies. He's not really doing it for the good of his country, the world or humanity, but for his family. Ugh! Cue the violins. He's a sensitive man.

He's given a team of Navy Seals and he trots the globe in search of a cure. Lo and behold, he discovers it buried within a semi-operational World Health Organization (WHO) compound in Cardiff, UK. After about 80 painful minutes of poorly directed, c-g heavy zombie attacks, the picture plops itself down for the rest of the almost-two-hour running time and forces us to watch a long, drawn-out and horrendously dull sequence where Pitt extracts the cure.

The screenplay, based on a novel by Max Brooks (a prolific comedy writer for SNL) and purportedly adapted by four writers (if one wishes to call them that), is bereft of any genuine originality, characters and worst of all, saddled with a bare bones plot with no shades or layering. I will always be the first person in the world to forgive a mediocre script in a genre picture IF the direction delivers first-rate thrills, chills and visuals with something resembling a voice. Zack Snyder's unrated director's cut of his Dawn of the Dead remake is a perfect example of a mediocre screenplay thoroughly enlivened on a visceral level by his visual gifts.

World War Z is virtually a non-screenplay. Pitt and his revolting family are strictly types, the military officials are all stock and the only characters with a few shards of interesting elements (a Spanish family they take refuge with, a female Israeli soldier who actually survives a zombie attack and an Israeli official in charge of the operations in his walled city), are all given short-shrift to the empty vessel that is Pitt's character.

And now we get to the worst of the worst - the suspense and action. All of the action setpieces are directed in the seemingly fashionable multi-camera closeups, virtually no mediums or wides, herky jerky movement, sloppy compositions and ADHD cutting. The few extreme wide shots - the ones that take place in Israel especially - seem CGI'd within an inch of their lives and because we never really connect with any of the characters when zombies are storming over the walls (nor do we ever get any decent shots of the zombies themselves), it's pretty much all for nothing. When the script locks us and the characters within the British WHO enclave the opportunities for genuine suspense within a claustrophobic situation are there, but Forster is too ham-fisted as a director to make any of it count.

The most egregious example of horrendous direction occurs in a sequence set in a full airplane in flight when a zombie attack occurs. Great idea, but even Snakes On A Plane was generally better-directed than the messy beats of herky-jerky vomit puddles created by the woefully gum-eyed Forster.

The movie is a major snore. It's cacophonous, boringly relentless, bereft of any sense of spatial geography and NEVER scary or suspenseful. Even more stupidly is just how bloodless the picture is - literally. I'm not saying we needed gore-galore, but part of the contemporary zombie ethos is the cannibalism and head trauma to stop zombies - and what little we get has no impact - mostly because of the aforementioned incompetence, but partially because the studio clearly wanted to generate a PG-13 experience.

Idiots! It's a zombie picture! And you know what, I've seen some bad zombie pictures in my time, but none of the looked so uselessly expensive and delivered virtually no bang for the buck. I'm the last person to trash a big budget, but I'm happy to do so when it's wasted on such pathetically manufactured piles of dung like World War Z.

I can only reiterate that it is, without a doubt, the worst zombie picture of all time.

"World War Z" is in massive worldwide release via Paramount Pictures.

FAST & FURIOUS 6 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - If you are brain dead, you will enjoy this.

Fast & Furious 6 (2013) i Pubic Hair
Dir: Justin Lin
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kang, Gal Godot, Ludacris

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Law enforcement officials across North America were out in full force on the opening weekend of Fast & Furious 6, the latest instalment of the increasingly idiotic car chase franchise. The pigs' widely publicized goal was to keep eyes peeled for young copycat road warriors. This, I believe is further proof of civilization's decline. That youthful audience members are stupid enough to think they can match the make believe stunts on view in a movie must surely prove how many brain dead kids out are there inheriting the Earth. Another argument, I'd say, for strangulation at birth.

Look, I grew up in the heyday of great car chase pictures like Bullitt, The French Connection, The Seven Ups et al, but I never thought I'd be able to emulate behind-the-wheel exploits of Popeye Doyle. I can also assure you that if, by some stroke of the imagination Fast & Furious 6 had been released in those halcyon days, I - and most other action movie aficionados would have complained how awful the picture was. We might have forgiven the supposed plot, but never, ever would the sloppy filmmaking be applauded. Even the lowest drawer bottom feeding no-budget drive-in car chase picture during the 70s was better shot and edited than this noisy, overblown pacifier for testosterone-infused pinheads who require constant suckling at the teat of their Mamas.

This, of course, was in the days when the movies used real cars, real drivers and real crack-up mayhem and didn't rely on added CGI to pump up the action.

Rob Cohen's first instalment of the series, The Fast and the Furious, was certainly no cinematic ground breaker, but it was a reasonably well directed action thriller that featured a panoply of hunks, babes and hot metal on wheels. In fact the movie would have served very nicely as a one-off. Given that the movie was generated during the Decline, a one-off would never be enough. A sequel or two was idiotically inevitable and as such, each instalment got progressively worse - first with John ("I used to have something to say before I became a hack of the highest order") Singleton, then all the others by the supremely talentless Justin Lin.

Fast & Furious 6 finds our fast-riding heist pullers living in far flung corners of the Earth - out of reach from the law and extradition for their victimless crimes (they only steal from scumbags). When top cop Dwayne Johnson comes to them with news that a super elite group of car racing terrorists are wreaking havoc and appear to have Vin Diesel's old girlfriend in their clutches, there's much talk about "family" and how you don't abandon "family" in their time of need. In exchange for complete immunity from prosecution, our motley assortment of drivers engage in a dangerous mission to stop the terrorists and extract the supposedly brainwashed member of their crew.

This, of course, is the most implausible element of the movie. How can you brainwash a character that is brain dead? Then again, all the characters suffer from this affliction as do the audiences watching and enjoying the picture.

The movie quickly plunges into wall-to-wall action. None of it is well staged. Every set piece is a patchwork quilt of badly composed shots edited machine-gun style within an inch of their life and with no sense of geography. Especially heinous is that most of the cuts are driven by sound cues, not visual ones.

Today's audiences seem to love that style - or at least they've been pounded into submitting to it whether they like it or not. The movie just left me exhausted and depressed.

Suicide seems to be the only option after watching pictures like Fast & Furious 6. Either that or genocide for all those who patronize and/or - gulp - actually get a kick out of it.

"Fast & Furious 6" is in wide release from Universal.

THE HANGOVER PART III - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Please, let this finally be over.

The Hangover Part III (2013) 1 PUBIC HAIR
Dir. Todd Phillips
Starring: Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianikis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, John Goodman

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Could anything be worse than The Hangover Part II?

Yes.

The Hangover Part III.

This one reaches some kind of nadir I didn't think was possible after Part II, but Part III opens with Zach Galifianikis "accidentally" killing a giraffe. If you think that's funny, I can only assume you think kiddie porn is legitimate erotica, that America's War On Terror is not about money and that for-profit marine parks are a humane way to treat dolphins and whales.

I'll go a step further. If you think this is a good movie, you're just plain stupid.

The Hangover was a somewhat unexpected comedy hit in 2009. Then again, there was a time when a movie like that would not be an unexpected hit at all. It was a genuinely hilarious fish out of water gross-out laugh-grabber. It took the world by storm - as it should have. Since its makers had already created a movie that was just fine, one assumed the studio might have left well enough alone and allowed the picture to remain an untouchable stand-alone picture with the potential to be a comedy classic.

But no, more money was needed and the greedy oinkers in their designer suits could sniff the added earning potential of a franchise. Too bad. The second instalment was little more than a tired retread that resurrected the characters from the first film, pretty much aped the structure, but instead of setting it in Vegas, they shifted the locale to Bangkok.

Well, Part II surprisingly garnered a whack of dough - surprising because it was so utterly dreadful. Not only that, but it was racist beyond belief, aimed at the most mind-challenged knuckle-draggers and simply not funny (unless you were one of the aforementioned individuals of the moron persuasion).

Since the first picture delivered such memorable characters, it was predictably inevitable that audiences would want to see them again. Sadly, audiences these days are a sorry lot and need to see the same thing over and over and over again. In The Hangover, Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Doug (Justin Bartha) were a pathetic, but believable and somewhat endearing wolf pack of mismatched buddies who visited Vegas to have one last blowout before one of them ties the knot. Under the influence of copious amounts of booze and drugs, the groom-to-be mysteriously disappeared and the other pals, all suffering from hazy hangovers, attempted to piece together their “lost weekend” and find their missing friend. As the film proceeded, more and more of their adventures came back to them and oh, what a night it turned out to be!

The comedy writing was so sharp, funny and unabashedly, but brilliantly crude in Hangover I that one hoped the filmmakers would find an entirely new adventure for a tremendous clutch of characters. They deserved better than what Part II gave them.

Part II, as loathsome as it was, though, seems in retrospect a masterpiece compared to Part III.

Using the lamest device imaginable, our heroes decide to conduct an intervention and commit the crazy Alan to a detox centre. In the process, they're kidnapped by a gangster (a loud and extremely unfunny John Goodman) who forces them to ferret out the mad Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) who's stolen a whack of gold. Doug is held as ransom and the movie nosedives into a tedious mess involving a return trip to Vegas to save their buddy.

The movie plods along to its inevitable happy ending and if I laughed at least once, I can't remember what it was for.

As over-the-top as The Hangover was, it actually had a strange sense of credibility going for it, which, in both sequels, is thrown completely out the window. Okay, so it’s a gross-out bro-mance, you say. Who needs credibility? Well, I’d argue that it was that very credibility that made the proceedings in the first movie so damned funny. Here, all we get are strained, over-the-top gags in a formula that's become very stale, very fast.

While Part III spares us the racism and the extremely unpleasant sexual exploitation subtext of Part II (as well as the "benign" presence of convicted rapist Mike Tyson), it unforgivably gives us no genuinely surprising laughs.

Again, on good will alone, The Hangover Part III will probably be a big hit, but all that's going to prove is just how horrendously bereft of brain-matter contemporary audiences are un-enviably "endowed" with.

I can hack stupid when it's funny, but here, it's just plain stupid.

And worst of all, it's a big fat bore.

"The Hangover Part III" is in wide release via Warner Brothers.

THE GREAT GATSBY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Have you ever witnessed the results of a coat-hanger abortion? You haven't? Then look no further than the abomination that is Baz Luhrmann's latest hack job.

I know you have anal fissures my dear.
I'll be gentle with the butt plug tonight.

The Great Gatsby (2013)
NO STARS LOW ENOUGH, BUT I HAPPILY BESTOW 1 (ONE) PUBIC HAIR UPON IT
Dir. Baz Luhrmann
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, Amitabh Bachchan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Have you seen Scary Movie 5? No? Well get thee to a multiplex pronto. I can promise you a far more edifying experience than suffering through Baz Luhrmann's rectal drippings masquerading as a movie. If Luhrmann had wanted to do a greater disservice to F. Scott Fitzgerald than miserably adapting The Great Gatsby, he'd have been better off digging up Zelda Fitzgerald's corpse and penetrating her withered maggot-lubed anus, whilst having the whole unsightly affair videotaped and posted to YouTube.

This is the sort of movie I get no pleasure in writing about. It's so awful, I'm not even inspired to expose its failings with humour. (Terence Malick's kind of stolen that crown anyway.) Luhrmann's Gatsby is unequivocally the nadir of his rancid career - one in which he's crapped out a canon that represents one smelly nadir after another (each one resplendent with pieces of undigested niblets of corn). This utter abomination is so reprehensible you wish to God there was some way to wash the sheer filth of it from your memory banks, but alas, I suspect that even a lobotomy would do little to relieve the memory of one of the worst movies ever made. Hell, it might even be the absolute worst ever made - at least, one supposes, until Luhrmann's next film.

1949 yielded great performances from Alan Ladd and Shelley Winters, whilst 1974 yielded a great supporting cast. Both had dreadful Daisy Buchanans.

Fitzgerald's novel has been tempting filmmakers forever, but only three (not including a silent 1928 version) have made the plunge and not one of them qualifies as a successful effort. That said, even the deeply flawed 1949 and 1974 versions are veritable masterworks when stacked up against Luhrmann's risible rusty-coat-hanger abortion. The '49 Gatsby, directed with little panache, but a modicum of competence by Elliot Nugent has a few things going for it. Performance-wise it features a great Myrtle played by Shelley Winters, which is, without question, the best rendering of Tom Buchanan's doomed lover to date. It also has the best Gatsby - bar none - the immortal Alan Ladd. And in spite of Nugent's mostly lacklustre direction, Gatsby's murder is the most harrowingly rendered of all of them. Still, one wonders what the studio was thinking when they assigned this film to a director whose biggest picture had been My Favorite Brunette starring Bob Hope.

The bloated 1974 version has an almost perfect supporting cast - notably Sam Waterston's Nick Carraway, the great Bruce Dern as Tom, Karen Black a close second to Winters's indelible portrait of Myrtle and Scott Wilson who delivers a heartbreaking performance as Blanche's long suffering husband and killer of Gatsby. Robert Redford looks right as Gatsby, but he's almost always trying too hard to be multidimensional. Both the '49 and '74 versions have dreadful Daisy Buchanans in the form of Betty Field and Mia Farrow respectively, but one might as well call them perfect compared to the horrid simp Luhrmann cast.

On the surface, The Great Gatsby as a novel has a lot going for it to make a good if not great picture. Its narrative, at least on the surface, is straightforward as all get out with finely detailed characters, a great Tragic Hero and any number of thematic elements evocative of the 20s that have universal resonance. In each case, however, too much conspired against Fitzgerald's novel to yield a genuinely good picture. Nugent was ultimately a lower drawer studio hack and as such the wrong director for the '49 version. As for the '74 picture, the otherwise phenomenal Jack Clayton (he directed Deborah Kerr in the best Henry James film adaptation of all time, The Innocents) seems weighted down by the bloat force of the insanely opulent production.

And Baz Luhrmann?

Well, he is, quite simply, a dolt.

Is Borat here? I need some learnings.

Nothing works in Gatsby 2013. DiCaprio had everything going for him to knock the ball out of the park, but lacking a director and forced to act with a supporting cast lacking chemistry and charisma to connect with him on even the most rudimentary level (save for the brilliant Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim), poor Leo is doomed to a fate almost as bad as anal penetration with a red hot poker. Tobey Maguire was a genuinely fine Peter Parker/Spider-Man for Sam Raimi, but here his boyish voice is so castrato-like that Nick Carraway becomes intolerable to pay any attention to. Joel Edgerton has done great work in the past, particularly in Animal Kingdom and Zero Dark Thirty, but his Tom Buchanan borders on the idiotic as he inexplicably slips in and out of a Clark Gable impersonation. Isla Fisher is thoroughly inadequate as Myrtle as is Jason Clarke as her Gatsby-whacking hubby.

Can someone skull fuck me in the eyes?
They're so...moist.

But now, as bad as the aforementioned cast is, let's take special care to heap a truckload or two of dung on the horridly simp-like Carey Mulligan who's one of these actresses who can seldom keep her mouth closed even when she has no lines. It's amazing more flies don't zoom into her maw when she's on-set. Worst of all, she's always dewy eyed - not just here, but in every revolting performance she delivers - most offensively in the ghastly Drive. Yes, Carey, we know you can always be on the verge of tears, but you're so annoying watery-eyed, we all - no doubt - wish to have a turn at smashing you one in the face and then utter the following with contempt: "NOW you DO have something to cry about."

Then again, it's Luhrmann's fault for casting her and we already know he makes the average gibbon seem like a Rhodes Scholar.

His purported style is frustratingly opulent. Luhrmann's offensive over-the-top music video approach is equal to that of an ice cream cone with rainbow coloured sprinkles dipped in arsenic and LSD. None of it makes any sense and never captures what should be the genuine melancholia that seeps from the pores of the rich and empty, so indelibly wrought by Mr. Fitzgerald. It's hallucinogenic and deadly in one fell swoop. His idiotic blending of contemporary music with a few period pieces is so all over the map that it feels like he couldn't completely commit to pulling a Sofia Coppola a la Marie Antoinette and the reason for this is simple - he has no genuine vision, he has nothing to say and, allow me to remind you, he is a dolt of the highest order.

He's no filmmaker. He's a nincompoop.

And his movie is not only a wretched mess, but also a deathly dull, horrendously inert and reprehensibly stupid experience.

"The Great Gatsby" is in wide release from Warner Bros, but I do genuinely re-assert that your money will be better spent at "Scary Movie 5", a risible bomb, but at least its honest about its mental retardation. It's also in 3-D. Why? Beats me. It looks as bad, if not worse than most contemporary 3-D movies.


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LLOYD THE CONQUEROR - Review By Greg Klymkiw

Mike Smith (right, above psycho with pig-like Vulcan ears) is no mere Trailer Park Boy, he's the funniest man in Canada. Brian Posehn (left) is no mere Brian Spukowski on The Sarah Silverman Show, he's just as funny as she is and sexier.  Harland Williams (loser with pig-like Vulcan ears on bottom right) is no mere Sheridan College dropout, he is Dumb and Dumber's pee drinking cop. These three giants of the motion picture industry can now be seen together - inspiring copious gushing geysers of spontaneous urination in all who bear witness to their genius in the otherwise mediocre Canuckian comedy effort Lloyd the Conqueror.

Lloyd the Conqueror (2012) ** + 1 Pubic Hair
dir. Michael Peterson
Starring: Mike Smith, Brian Posehn, Evan Williams,
Jesse Reid, Scott Patey, Tegan Moss, Harland Williams

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Damn, I wanted to like this movie. Who wouldn't? It's got a Holy Fucking Trinity of some of the best funny guys in the business (Mike Smith, Brian Posehn and Harland Williams) portraying 40-something losers (actually, mind-blowingly humungous losers) who devote all their off-time (and much of their "on-time", if you can call it that) to the inexplicably obsessive world of role-playing games.

We're not talking about the losers who stay at home glued to their monitors - pretending to be fairy kings, stout-hearted dwarves and bearded fucking wizards in a virtual world.

Nay, these are losers who don costumes (sort of like those maroons who show up to movie premieres as Vulcans, Wookies and fucking Gandalf) and engage in real-life jousts and tournaments in the great outdoors.

If Lloyd the Conqueror had stuck to THESE guys instead of the utterly unentertaining early 20-something losers who lead the film's narrative charge, then it might have had a hope in Hell of being some kind of comedy classic. (It sometimes feels like the filmmakers might have discovered this in the edit room, too. It's uncanny how the movie soars when Smith, Posehn and Williams are onscreen. It might have been best to snip away as much of the uncharismatic purported leads as possible and use every available frame of this Trio of merry mirth makers. The movie feels about 15 minutes too long anyway, so it wouldn't have hurt at all.)

Alas, the movie is little more than a tedious, overlong and (often) unfunny comedy. I was happy to forgive the perfunctory plot this type of movie usually has. In fact, it doesn't get more perfunctory than this: Focusing upon three online gamers who are threatened with a low GPA and the loss of their student loans at College, get a chance to boost their academic standing by participating in actual role play battle in the flesh with their nasty, prissy, grade-lowering Medieval Literature professor (Mike Smith in a nice rival to his role as "Bubbles" on Trailer Park Boys).

SIDENOTE: I also learned something new here. I had no idea colleges offered courses requiring anything resembling reading as I always assumed these institutions were a last resort for the academically challenged on both the student and faculty end of things. Yeah, yeah. So sue me. I'm a fucking snob.

What I was not able to forgive was the woefully dull and virtually interchangeable characters who are forced into this predicament, as well, sadly, as the screen-presence-bereft young actors who played these roles. (In fairness, I'm sure all three of these young thespians are imbued with talent, but I must reiterate that the writing of the characters they play does neither them nor the film any favours.) What films like this need are vibrant characters played by bigger-than-life talents - think "Bill and Ted" (Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter), Wayne's World (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) or "Harold and Kumar" (John Cho and Kal Penn).

Canada is certainly not without any number of great young actors with the comic chops of the above (Hell, a couple of the above-named ARE Canadian), BUT, the roles themselves in Lloyd the Conqueror needed to be written with the same panache that co-writers Andrew Herman and Michael Peterson invested in the roles played by Mike Smith, Brian Posehn and Harland (I wanna keep changing his surname to "Sanders") Williams. Stalwart supporting performers need lead performers who can blow them off the screen or at least hold their own. (Jesus Christ, think Max "fucking" Von Sydow going head to head with Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas in Strange Brew and you know what I'm talking about here.)

My dream cast for this movie would have been Canadian funny guys who are a bit long-in-tooth for the roles of the three young losers - imagine Jacob Tierney, Dov Tiefenbach, Jay Baruchel or hell, maybe even Don McKellar as a perennial student who just keeps taking college courses to get student loans. That's not only closer to what the film needed, but even thinking about first-rate talent like that might have inspired better writing for the three roles of the youthful "heroes".

Some might say, oh, but this is a low-budget Canadian film. Don't be so mean, Greg. Don't be so picky. It's Canadian. It's low budget. They tried really hard.

So fucking what?

Being Canadian and low-budget means the movie has to reach for the stratosphere, not the tip of the old landfill site in Winnipeg (which is the highest topographical point in that flat, godforsaken city of my youth).

All this said, I can still guarantee you the pleasure of soiling yourself whenever Mike Smith, Brian Posehn and Harland Sanders (Williams) are on screen.

These guys are the real thing and, good goddamn (!) they are funny.

"Lloyd the Conqueror" is in limited theatrical release across Canada. In Toronto it's playing at one of my favourite venues, The Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas (they have the best cheap Tuesday prices in town, so I suggest you see the movie then). Thanks to Smith, Posehn and Williams you'll be afforded a delectable Walmart Rollback admission price to soil your panties.