Sinbad and the Minotaur Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2011
Genre: Adventure / Fantasy
IMDB Rating: 3.5 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

The time has come for another episode of Historically Inaccurate Movie Night with Tropical Mary. We’ve done quite a few of them already, but we always had a special love for Cyclops, the movie that started this particular little adventure of ours. Nothing’s beaten Cyclops yet in terms of sheer laughs and total disregard for any semblance of historical truth, but this came pretty close! I don’t know much about Sinbad, but if we were to take the accuracy of the Minotaur’s portrayal as a guide, I’m gonna guess that they got his character completely wrong as well.

In a very loose sense Sinbad and the Minotaur follows Sinbad as he tries to locate the lost treasures of King Minos. There’s a minotaur, a sorcerer, a cannibal and various horned zombies thrown in to pad out the action, but not in any serious way that’s gonna make truck loads of sense. When all is said and done, though, it’s a barrel full of laughs if you’re in the mood for some mindless entertainment. As I did with The ImmortalsI present to you the polluted stream of consciousness that flowed during the course of this movie, followed by a fun little exercise Tropical Mary and I did in transliterating the Greek text in the movie 🙂

Kiss me, kiss me hard!

• America World Pictures and the Brothers Bradley present… Manu Bennett.
• This female is skilled in the deceptive art of stripper belly dancing.
• The Seven Wonders of the World before there were Seven Wonders of the World…
• And he’ll beat the crap out of you with the pepper grinder of doom!
• Make way for Emperor Trenchcoat Terry!
• Use the magic mist to escape!
• I have no idea what’s going on, but apparently it has something to do with a coke whore called Germaine.
• Now they have to go to the gates of the rash. Things are about to get nasty.
• Ancient Greek spoken by the whole Tourette’s of the world.
• Does anyone in this movie speak English?
• Quickly! Don the see-through harem pants of escaping!
• Everyone’s been at sea and now they’re bitter and blue-balled.
• Quickly men! Gather your ancient sporks and do battle with the enemy!
• This whole forest is made out of plastic.
• I totally promise this is a real cave. It looks like plastic bags held together by used chewing gum, but it really isn’t.
• I wonder if Harry Potter’s dad inherited his invisibility cloak from Sinbad?
• Reptilian Minotaur! I command thee to stand sloppy or get loosen!
• Something about Cinnabon’s adventures on the Seven Seas.
• The Dannii Minogue / Natalie Imbruglia look-alike is either plotting something spectacular, or her next album.
• By the blood of Pythagoras, if anyone here owns a MILF, kill them!
• What draconian laws these people have.
• Wait, if only the MILF owners are being killed, what happens to the MILFs?
• Welcome to a very special episode of Law and Order: Ancient Edition.
• How did Helios, the sun god, father a giant scaly minotaur?
• Hang on, how is this minotaur any different to a regular old bull?
• Helios the All Father? Got some Scandinavian leakage going on here…
• This girl’s really clever – she’s actually a raptor.
• He is the Lord of the Dance said he and he’ll lead you all wherever you may be.
• So the Minotaur is the god of the mountain named Monkey?
• You’d think the Colossus of Rhodes would be… more colossal.
• The High Priestess of the Minotaur is super high.
• A prophylactic like that must be worth something.

A big part of the movie’s plot revolved around Sinbad’s discovery of an ancient text written by King Minos. For such an ancient text it’s been typed out in beautiful Arial Greek font. Now, Tropical Mary’s Ancient Greek is far superior to my own, but I can read the alphabet, and we had a great time transliterating the text that popped up on-screen. To give you an idea of just how archaic the language is, the scroll reads:

espskssss kssiphgsb s hste oite uksooe ou zdksthtksieeph ksopsephbks chti thdrzd szdepsch.

Bet the guys behind the movie weren’t betting on people like us watching it 🙂 That’s Greek as spoken by a two-year old with a forked tongue.

The unholy offspring of a bull and a dung beetle’s night of drunken regret.

SINBAD AND THE MINOTAUR TRAILER

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1313: Cougar Cult Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 1.7 / 10
Level of Awful: Requires Post-Film Lobotomy
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

There are some movies out there that make you want to offer your soul to the devil if it meant getting a slight reprieve from it. There are other movies, however, that the devil himself wouldn’t have, and 1313: Cougar Cult just happens to be one of those. The reasons behind choosing to watch it were numerous – I wanted to watch it because I love Linnea Quigley, I wanted Tropical Mary to watch it to see if even her gay sensibilities could withstand it, but most of all I wanted to watch it without warning the Occult Specialist what it was about and see his facial reactions. While those were funny as hell, it still wasn’t enough to make watching this movie a worthwhile endeavour. Tropical Mary summed it up best: either give us more movie or give us more porn, but don’t leave us in this purgatory where we’re neither entertained nor turned on.

This one looks like he’s missing a chromosome.

Three sisters, affectionately dubbed Overbite Edwina, Flashpoints Victoria and Forever-Lost-Thong Clara, own a gorgeous mansion in some or other unspecified opulent neighbourhood. As three older sisters living together are prone to doing these cougars are on the lookout for young, buff men to help… um… service their needs. By that I of course mean cleaning the pool and cooking them the occasional meal. If a naked, oiled up massage happens then so be it, but it’s hardly a prerequisite for the job. But these aren’t your regular run-of-the-mill MILFy cougars, oh no. These gals are a coven of blood-thirsty witch cougars. They need their young man to feed on / become their mates / offer as sacrifices to their omnipotent feline goddess Calabast. I’m assuming Calabast is the Egyptian Bastet‘s Californian cousin, but I could be entirely wrong.

A 70s disco party is about the break out…

After eating their last pool boy the cougars need to bring in a little fresh meat. Enter Coopersmith, Darwin and Rufus. Each one delectable in their own unique way, they’re only here because they want to earn some money doing a summer job. This will involve undignified levels of shirtlessness, obscenely long shower scenes and unparalleled scenes of the boys sleep-fondling themselves. Occasionally the cougars will be thrown in for good measure, but they seem rather secondary to the tighty whitey-ness of the rest of the movie. There’s some glitter, a candle and questionable cougar effects thrown into the mixture, but all this movie really is is an excuse to watch somewhere between three and six men rubbing themselves along a bed for more than half of it.

So the $1 million budget didn’t go into the special effects?

According to my research the movie was shot in only three days. Believe me, it shows! When you’re not watching young men gyrating in ways that would make Madonna uncomfortable, you’re watching scenes of the Scream Queens that have already happened at least 3 times before. Words cannot actually describe the awfulness of this movie, but if you’re in the mood to see JUST HOW BAD z-cinema can be, then this is the perfect movie to watch. If nothing else, watch it to see the terror in the guys’ eyes, the acne on their faces and their various oddly placed nipples.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Nipples make jets of water go plume.
• Straight guys regularly exchange massaging tips by massaging each other whilst being virtually naked.
• You don’t need soap to have an intensive, all-body wash down.
• This movie proves that some actors don’t have breakout roles, they have come out roles.
• You can only feel a person’s aura if you stand behind them while they’re showering.
• You only need one candle to summon a demon hell goddess.
• Fairy dust works perfectly well as an agent for possessing a person’s soul.

1313: COUGAR CULT TRAILER

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House of Blood

Year of Release: 2006
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.7 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As any semi-regular visitor to this blog will know, I’m up for pretty much anything. Extraterrestrial vampire whores, sharktopodes, gay vampires, killer cartoon characters, shit monsters (no really – monsters made out of shit), I’ve seen it all and lived to tell the tale. Even with this experience under my belt, rarely have I encountered a movie as utterly banal as House of Blood (aka Chain Reaction). As often happens I could totally see what they were going for (a kind of The Village meets Triangle meets The Shawshank Redemption kind of vibe), but it was so poorly and unoriginally put together that all you’re left with is this steaming pile of self-righteous movie filled with characters fond of using big words but having no idea what they actually mean. Also, it’s a bit longer than your usual crapfest: at just over 100 minutes, it drags the pain out a lot more than most movies would dare to do.

Eye, speaketh like a tool doth I.

Douglas Madsen is just a regular doctor who frequently laments the loss of his parents roughly 50 years ago when he was but a wee lad. That is until one day when Fate decides to throw him a curve ball and Douglas lands up with a set of completely different, but somehow interlinked, problems. Going out on his rounds (in a densely wooded area with no people) Douglas finds his car plowing head first into a truck transporting criminals to another prison. After a small shoot out and the brutal death of several policemen the criminals abduct Douglas, thinking that he might be useful in treating one of their own who has been shot. The criminals steal the dead policemen’s clothes and run into the forest to make their escape. Why they didn’t just POSE as policemen in the outfits I don’t understand, but this seems to be the path the director wanted to take.

Lamb’s blood gravy, just like mama used to make it.

When the criminals went down to the woods that day they didn’t realise they were in for a big surprise. They thought that the rundown, seemingly abandoned cottage in the middle of the forest with no electricity and hidden by a dense and mysterious fog would be their salvation; shockingly, it wasn’t. In this cozy little cottage that would’ve sent Goldilocks running for her life lives a quaint little family that speaks a dialect of Ye Olde English that would irritate the most hardened of Renaissance Fair goers. Despite the obvious language barrier between the residents’ archaic tongue and the criminals’ constant screams of “shut the fuck up!”, with a little persuasion (at gun point) the family can be rather hospitable and agree, under duress, to help the guys out with their wounded friend.

Sweety, you’ll never find a husband going around looking like that.

Alas, all is not as it seems with the mountain-dwelling family. It’s all been perfectly civilised up until one of the criminal’s has to have his arm amputated with a machete. Things go a little awry at this point. In a move that I’m putting down to sheer indecisiveness from the script writers, the family turns out to be a group of undead-zombie-vampire-cannibals, who Douglas has to escape from. This might have been tolerable, but the joke is that this is only half the movie. Douglas does escape, only to find himself in some bizarre loop of consciousness, and the movie decides to repeat itself. The second time around he’s accompanied by a different group of criminals, but it’s essentially just watching the same movie twice with a little tweaking here and there. In summary: no acting skills, no English language proficiency, no shame.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Being shot in the arm usually means that the whole thing has to be amputated.
• ‘Friendly fire’ refers to friends getting together to gun down policemen.
• Statistically there is a one in a billion chance of a doctor crashing into a prisoner transit van.
• Sheep remain remarkably calm whilst you slit their throats with a blunt knife.
• To hell with salt – pour blood over your food, it’s just as tasty.
• You should live your life in such a way that the Count de Sade himself would envy you.
• Sociopathic lusts greatly outweigh psychopathic social obligations.

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Jersey Shore Shark Attack Ft. Tropical Mary

Year of Release: 2012
Genre: Horror / Action
IMDB Rating: 3.4 / 10
Level of Awful: Medium
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

For anyone that has never set foot in the beautiful city of Cape Town, you’ll never know quite how miserable our winter can be. After 5 months of glorious summer and a very brief autumn when the leaves begin to fall, you’re suddenly lurched into the next 4 months of non-stop cold, wind and, thanks to the wind, rain that comes at you sideways. In this kind of situation, there’s really only one option: hide out at Tropical Mary‘s house with Jersey Shore Shark Attack and wait for the storm to ride itself out. I’m not going to advocate that this movie is any good, because that would be a blatant lie, but for anyone who has had the misfortune of being subjected to MTV’s Jersey Shore then this is an absolute must-watch. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this movie goes about ripping off a bunch of orange oompa loompas while throwing some albino sharks in for good measure. How could you say no to that?

The country’s brightest young people get together to discuss serious issues.

It’s a tough day down on the Jersey Shore. A tangerine Nooki suspects that her ex-boyfriend Gino ‘The Complication’ Moretti (because, apparently, whenever he’s around, situations with members of the opposite sex become complicated) has been cheating on her (how an ex-boyfriend can cheat on you raises several questions that I couldn’t answer, so I’m just gonna assume it’s a guido thing). Her suspicions are apparently confirmed when we switch to a shot of him in bed in nothing but his boxers whilst a topless female sleeps next to him. He throws her out on the balcony with nothing but a pillow to protect her modesty, but Nooki’s a smart bird and thinks that something’s up when she discovers a lace bra in The Complication’s bed. Things just got complicated.

If we leave it out long enough we can make shark jerky.

You know things are going to go into a bit of a downward spiral whenever Dylan Vox (of Vampire Boys, Aliens VS Avatars and various gay porn movies fame) appears on the scene, and lo and behold there he was in a golf shirt with a popped collar. Now you know that shit’s gonna go down. In an unexpected educational turn I learned that creatures on the Jersey Shore are fiercely territorial, with Vox and his preppy crowd fighting desperately to keep Nooki and her carrot-coloured people on their half of the beach. Through this series of informative events we are introduced to the rest of Nooki’s people: she’s got her pals J-Moni and BJ, while The Complication likes to hang out with Donnie and Paulie Balzac. Before he’s eaten, the boys were also friendly with a guy called JP who, despite being quite regular in size, is constantly referred to as a midget.

I almost got eaten by a shark. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Well, that more or less covers the ‘Jersey Shore’ part of the movie’s title; let us now move on to the actual shark attack. In an attempt to improve the Jersey Shore and attract a more wealthy and classy kind of visitor (hence the growing number of preppy hipsters), the town has begun drilling just off shore. Drilling for what I’m not entirely certain, but it hardly seems all that important. The point is is that the drilling has been sending tsunami-like sound waves out across the bay and colliding with a crystalline cave full of albino sharks. The sharks, who are seemingly very keen listeners, follow these sound waves back to their point of origin. When they arrive at the Shore (keep an eye on them swimming – I’m pretty sure it’s just recycled Sharktopus footage) they begin to eat everyone in sight. It’ll fall to The Complication to defeat the preppies, win Nooki’s love, save the entire Jersey Shore population and defeat the sharks once and for all. Just another day in the life of a guido.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• New in Jersey Shore fashion: Jersey Shorts (kickass butt not included).
• It’s fine to do you, but you should never do it in public.
• Sharks are a lot like whales, just with fins.
• The bigger the vibration, the bigger the shark attack.
• Any semi-capable police station has a well stock armoury right next to its kitchenette.
• Present tense: to drown. Past tense: to drownded.
• Present tense: to drive. Past tense: to drove.

JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK TRAILER

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Ghosts of Goldfield

Year of Release: 2007
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 3.4 / 10
Level of Awful: High
Breast-O-Meter: 0/5

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:

As a fun little fact before I dive into the review, this movie was originally meant to be a part of the Urban Legend franchise. Under the working title Urban Legends: Goldfield Murders, this was meant to follow on from Urban Legends: Bloody Mary  before Sony bought back the rights to the franchise. It’s just as well really; while Bloody Mary at least tried to cling in there, amateur doesn’t begin to describe this movie. Maybe it’s because the guys behind it chose to go with a less universally known urban legend (I’d never heard of Goldfield or its supposed ghosts until I watched this movie. Some useful information can be found by clicking here), but all this movie really boils down to is 88 minutes of every clichéd ghost trick in the b-movie book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a laugh a minute to watch, but when Kellan Lutz is your biggest draw card you really aren’t giving the audience much to work with.

Hi, we’re here to throw ourselves in Satan’s path and then whine about it later on.

After some thumping techno beats from the production companies responsible for this little cheese fest we’re thrown into a car full of horribly clichéd college students. Julie’s your typical ghost-hunting psychology major who’s deadly serious and in touch with the voices from the spirit realm. To balance out her intense blandness she chose Mike to be her jackass boyfriend. Mike’s just your standard scuzball college character who keeps pulling pranks and flirting with other females. In this case said female is Keri, the whiny spoiled girl bedecked in pink and who can’t understand why this ghost hunt can’t be a kick-ass party. She’s here with Dean, who there really isn’t much to say about since he just kinda hovers in the background and grunts disapprovingly when she flirts back with Mike. The group’s fifth wheel is Chad, the intelligent, sensitive beef cake who tries to look out for Julie and protect her from Mike’s general douchebaggery.

Verily, my milkshake is better than thine.

Julie and co. land up staying in the haunted hotel when it turns out that the motel she booked them into doesn’t exist. How this happened is never explained, so we just plow on with the story. Julie’s trying to make contact with Elizabeth, a prostitute who lived in the Goldfield hotel during the town’s gold rush. Elizabeth was supposedly murdered by the hotel’s owner and her 2-week-old child dumped down a mine shaft under the building. Julie wants to confirm the specter’s existence to see why she’s trapped and unable to move on to the other side. I never knew that ghost psychology was such a big subject in American universities, but you learn something new every day. How the group struggles for nearly an hour of the movie’s runtime to find Elizabeth is baffling since you can hear her whining ‘where’s my baby?’ in the background every five minutes, but who am I to question the director’s vision?

Celine Dion: the crack whore years.

Suddenly, without apparent cause and only 20 minutes of movie left to go, Elizabeth decides to go balls to the wall and haunt the crap out of these kids. It starts out with some innocent possession to give Julie some flashbacks of what happened to her, but not long after the possessions lead to Mike and Keri making the beast with two backs on a dusty couch. Not content with a supernatural orgasm, Elizabeth decides that the next step is to kill all of the kids as quickly and brutally as possible, all supposedly in the name of finding her baby. How this ties in with the baby is another of the movie’s great unanswered questions, but I didn’t feel like dwelling on it. Julie has some mysterious connection to the old hotel and to Elizabeth’s ghost, and she’s the only one that can end the bygone hooker’s reign of transcendental terror. The question, however, is whether or not Elizabeth is the only ghost in the hotel and whether putting her to rest will really solve all of Julie’s problems.

LIFE’S LESSONS LEARNED:

• Girl-on-girl action is cheaper than trying to get a man involved.
• The sound of the car engine exploding doesn’t usually herald good news.
• Bartenders in ghost towns don’t serve up fancy cocktails.
• It’s rude to speak ill of the slutty dead.
• One woman’s brutal torture and murder is another woman’s cheesy, torch-lit ghost story.
• A man must be very well endowed if he can have sex with you through his jeans and yours.
• It’s very inconvenient when your boyfriend’s penis accidentally slips inside your best friend.
• Some guys won’t screw dead chicks; even douchebags have standards.

GHOSTS OF GOLDFIELD TRAILER

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