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Friday, January 16, 2009 ( 1/16/2009 10:05:00 PM ) Bill S.  "WE ALL HAVE OUR SECRETS." Fred Olen Ray is a busy guy. In addition to his work creating low-budget horror movies like the inimitable Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Evil Toons -- and wrestling under the nom-du-ring of Freddie Valentine -- Ray is a prolific creator of equally cheap soft-core skin flicks under the name of Nicholas Medina. Regularly stuffed into the late hours of movie cable channels, Medina's oeuvre is typified by the DVD version of Voodoo Dollz (Retromedia), an eighty-minute series of hot girl-on-girl sex scenes held together by the sketchiest of plots.The movie concerns a buxom "schoolgirl" named Christina (Christine Nguyen), who is kicked out of the Collinsport School for Girls after being caught in flagrante with a flat-chested classmate by the school's headmistress. "In all my years at this school," the outraged headmistress (a too-briefly-seen Michelle Bauer) states, "I've only seen something like this thirty or forty times!" Because she's "untouched by the hands of men," Christina gets shunted off to the Dunwich School for Girls where she's assigned a room with a neophyte voodoo practitioner Maria (Charlie Laine). Roomie Maria is in serious lust with the all-girl school's "only guy for miles around," studly gardener Jeff (Alexandre Voisvert a.k.a. Voodoo). But she has two rivals in blond bimbettes Jilly and Sandra (Beverly Lynne and Nichole Sheridan). Utilizing a mime-faced voodoo doll, snippy Maria regularly arouses the latter without ever letting her achieve full orgasm. Fortunately for the enthralled Sandra, Christina shows up to help the poor girl. Medina/Ray also tosses in a miniscule bit of plot concerning Dunwich schoolmistress Miss Dambahla (Monique Parent) and her shapely henchwoman Miss Santana (Hawaiian adult film queen Syren), who have plans to sacrifice our "bad girl" heroine to a voodoo deity whose name I couldn't quite catch. This leads to a thrill-free climax with "virgin" Christina tied to a cross in the school's basement/dungeon and the otherwise useless Fred showing up to rescue her. The movie concludes with one of the least convincing conflagrations in low-budget history. But, really, you don't come to a flick like this expecting anything more than what it offers: lots of scenes of pretend schoolgirls doffing their uniforms and writhing together on-camera to a waka-waka guitar. "Older" thespians Parent and Syren get their own steamy pretend sex scene, and there's also a prolonged shower sequence where Miss Santana makes like the lads from Porky's and peeps on a slickly lathered Christina. But the primary focus remains on them naughty schoolgirls -- which is as it should be. "We're all outcasts," Maria tells Christina when they first meet. "You know: the girls nobody wants." Judging from the extensive adult film resume that each one of these ladies brings to this picture, you know that statement ain't true. Labels: psychotronic psinema # |Thursday, January 15, 2009 ( 1/15/2009 07:52:00 AM ) Bill S. McGOOHAN: I was seventeen-going-on-eighteen when The Prisoner debuted on American television: an age where I was just getting primed to the idea that stories could have more than one meaning. Actor/writer Patrick McGoohan's twist-y sci-spy series was just the right vehicle for a geek like yours truly to take this idea further. Though they never used the character's name in the series, you knew the character was John Drake, the hero of the more conventional Danger Man/Secret Agent. I remember watching the series with my father, a big James Bond fan at the time, who wasn't that impressed with the show's free-wheeling finale. Me, I loved it -- even if I didn't really get what the hell was going on in it. Like everybody else, I liked to pretend I knew what it was about. The Prisoner helped pave the way for more, openly complex teleseries, though, admittedly, it took some time for this idea to take root. As an admirer of the show, I have to admit to feeling no small sense of frustration over the path that McGoohan's career took in the years following. Though skillfully menacing playing the heavy in a variety of movies and teevee series, it was all work-for-hire from a man we knew could do so much more if given more creative control. Still, he was a great villain: his clipped delivery made him an ideal foil for Peter Falk's Columbo, a series on which he did multiple guest turns, also serving as occasional writer and director. It was always a pleasure to see him on screen, even in an empty calorie flick like Silver Streak. Each time I saw him, a part of me flashed on the boyish exhilaration I felt the first time watching Number Six struggle to escape the island which may have been nothing more than his mind's creation. R.I.P. John Drake. # | Tuesday, January 13, 2009 ( 1/13/2009 07:23:00 AM ) Bill S. THE OLD GUN IN THE WOUND TRICK: Caught the first four hours of this season's 24: perhaps it's just me, but the frantic goings on seem a little rote this time, too obviously indebted to other movies (e.g., the second Die Hard) and too overly concerned with justifying its own over-the-top pulp impulses. Are we supposed to accept Kurtwood Smith, of all people, as a grandstanding senator condemning Jack Bauer's use of harsh interrogation tactics? Red freaking Foreman? Surely, you jest. I did enjoy the sequence where Jeanene Garofalo's F.B.I.computer wiz gets into a computer fight with Mary Lynn Rajskub's Chloe. Dueling grrl geeks –- now that's hot . . . # | Sunday, January 11, 2009 ( 1/11/2009 10:21:00 AM ) Bill S. "YOU MELON HIGH SCHOOL FREAK!" Let's start this out with my own admission of personal bias. I took Statistics as a graduate student way too many years ago, and while I did okay in the class at the time, I must confess that a good 90% of the material fled my brain fifteen minutes after I aced my final. Stats and me are not close friends -- let's just say I'm numerically challenged and leave it at that. I thus approached Shin Takahashi's The Manga Guide to Statistics (No Starch Press) in a somewhat resistant frame of mind. "So you're gonna make Cramer's Coefficient interesting to this numbers fumbling geezer? You've got your work cut out for ya!" The "EduManga" is told through a young girl named Rui, whose father works for a marketing firm. When Rui's dad brings home a dreamy-looking co-worker named Igarashi, the fourteen-year-old immediately develops a school crush on her elder. To get him to return to her home ("Thinking of him makes me happy," she says as she squeezes her teddy bear), she asks her father if she could be tutored in statistics by one of his colleagues. Dad, tearfully overjoyed to learn that his daughter is interested in his job, agrees. The tutor that Rui receives, however, proves not to be the handsome Igarishi, but a bespectacled nerd named Mr. Yamamoto. Rui is disappointed by this seeming bait-and-switch, though most readers can immediately guess where that aspect of the storyline is headed once Yamamoto removes his Coke-bottle glasses. Still, she accepts her new tutor's teachings, which are conducted on a chapter-by-chapter basis –- first in manga format than as written exercises. The manga portions, illustrated by Iroha Inoue, are clean and cutely rendered in shoujo style. Girly Rui is your typical uniformed schoolgirl: prone to histrionic overreactions that are utilized for comic effect. Though much of the art is focused on student and teacher interacting in Rui's home, Inoue does toss in a few visual jokes: imagining a frustrated Rui as a distressed Picasso-esque figure for the space of one panel, drawing Yamamoto as a mustachioed waiter serving up a lesson's "main course" in a later panel. To my eyes, the book could've benefited from more of these moments, but perhaps the textbook's creators were concerned with visually straying too far from the task at hand. In general, I found the manga lessons clear-cut for the first half of the volume -- and less immediately readable as the subject matter grew denser and more graph-beholden. Takahashi (abetted by scripter re_akino) utilizes some clever character-driven examples to demonstrate statistical concepts. When we learn that both Rui and her teacher follow a girl's manga series entitled Melon High School Story, for instance, Yamamoto uses a reader's survey to demonstrate the difference between categorical and numerical data. Later on, we see that the teacher has won a Melon High School Story key chain for himself taking part in the survey. Just another grown-up manga freak. Statistics proves to be the first of several translated "EduManga" being released by No Starch Press (among the upcoming titles: Guides to Databases, Calculus, Physics and Molecular Biology). The series' shoujo style and spunky schoolgirl heroines make the books a good potential fit for those manga readers who've made Fruits Basket a hit, though I can't help wondering how many male student readers will key into panels showing Rui adolescently mooning over blond-haired Igarishi. Perhaps the aim of this series is to make math friendlier to an audience that historically has been perceived as indifferent to this type of material. (Though in America, at least, recent studies have suggested that young girls are catching up to boys in the arena of math skills.) If so, who cares what the boys think? And for the record, while I enjoyed reading this wittily constructed manga textbook, fifteen minutes after I put it down, 90% of the information fled my brain . . . Labels: sixty-minute manga # | |
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