DROP DEAD SEXY -- Movie Review by Porfle

(Originally posted at Bumscorner.com in 2005) 

 

Seeing the front cover picture for DROP DEAD SEXY (2005), which shows Crispin Glover and Jason Lee lugging the dead body of a beautiful blonde, I immediately thought "Weekend At Bernadette's." But this isn't about two guys trying to pass off a corpse as alive--the writers were actually able to come up with something a little different, thank goodness, and for the most part, it's pretty entertaining.

Lee and Glover star as Frank and Eddie, two dumb 'n' dumber Texas boys who try to earn some extra cash on the side by performing certain illegal tasks for a corpulent strip-club owner named Spider (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who gives new meaning to the term "shifty-eyed." 

Frank works for a used car dealer named Big Tex (Burton Gilliam), dancing around in the street in a cowboy outfit with a big cartoony head, while Eddie makes his living as a gravedigger (or "subterranean architect" as he likes to put it, proudly proclaiming: "People spend the rest of their lives in my holes!") 

Their latest task for Spider is to drive a pickup full of bootleg cigarettes to Mexico to sell them, with the promise of ten percent of the take. Spider tells Frank that he'll kill them if they mess things up, which is no problem until Frank stops in the middle of nowhere to take a leak and the truck explodes, destroying all $250,000 worth of Spider's cigarettes.


They decide to hide out for a while at Frank's boyhood home, where they find his mother, Ma Muzzy (Lin Shaye--she's the one who made you want to throw up in THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and KINGPIN) stuffing her beaver--she's an taxidermist. Later, while scanning the newspaper, Frank notices an obituary for Crystal, the recently-deceased young wife of the town's richest man, Tom Harkness (Xander Berkeley, who played the milk-drinking stepdad in T2), and the picture shows her wearing a hugely expensive-looking necklace. Eddie recalls seeing her wearing it right before he buried her, and suddenly a lightbulb goes off in Frank's head--all they have to do is dig her up, grab the necklace, fence it, and pay back Spider, keeping whatever's left over for themselves. ("What if she's not dead?" Eddie worries.) Easy, right? 

Wrong, because she isn't wearing the necklace, and when the night watchman shows up before they can re-bury her, they end up having to take her with them back to Frank's house, which will be a direct violation of Ma Muzzy's rule against having girls in their room.

This, of course, is where the main complications of the story commence, especially when Frank hatches a new plan to ransom Crystal's body back to her wealthy husband. Meanwhile, Eddie is becoming a bit too infatuated with the beautiful dead woman lying on his bed, and for a few brief moments we get the idea that this movie is going to head off into some really weird directions. Fortunately, though, Eddie's interest remains platonic, and when he finally recognizes her as one of his favorite strippers at a club called "The Mean-Eyed Pussy Cat", the boys begin to investigate her past. 

This is where DROP DEAD SEXY stops being a total farce and morphs into a murder mystery. Eddie's pal, the coroner (Brad Dourif) informs them that Crystal had swimming pool water, not lake water, in her lungs when she was examined, but that the police didn't follow this up. Frank and Eddie suspect the husband of murder and hatch a plan to bring him to justice while ripping him off at the same time. What follows is still pretty funny but a lot of attention is paid to this increasingly complicated plot, which I didn't mind since it's pretty well handled and supplies a few nice surprises, and leads up to a cool shootout at the end. And the lead actors are so good in their roles that when the movie changes tone somewhat, they don't miss a beat.


The best thing about DROP DEAD SEXY, in fact, is the comedy team of Jason Lee and Crispin Glover. Lee displays a great "Bud Abbott" straight-man style here, but he's a lot funnier--he's forever impressed with his own brilliance even as everything he does backfires, and his reactions to the constant stupidity of his partner are often priceless. Crispin Glover, as usual, seems to have just dropped in from another planet. I find him fascinating to watch in whatever he does, and his deadpan portrayal of a laconic, hypersensitive, terminally-confused Texas boy is a wonder to behold and manages somehow to be restrained and over-the-top at the same time. I love the scene where Frank and Eddie visit the coroner, because it gives us a chance to see two of Hollywood's finest oddballs, Crispin Glover and Brad Dourif, trading dialogue over the dead body of a beautiful naked woman who, oddly enough, is holding a glass of white wine, while Jason Lee looks on in utter consternation. (You just knew there had to be some necrophilia in this movie, right?)

DARK STORM -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/15/10

 

After watching EARTHSTORM with Stephen Baldwin, I thought to myself, "Wow, I sure would like to see another cheapo Canadian ARMAGEDDON-inspired Stephen Baldwin sci-fi movie with the word 'storm' in the title." 

Well, the good folks at the SyFy Channel and Lionsgate must've heard me, because sure enough, here's DARK STORM (2006), a cheapo Stephen Baldwin sci-fi movie made in Canada with the tagline "Armageddon is on the horizon."  Yay...

At least Stephen Baldwin fit the part of a building-demolition expert in EARTHSTORM.  Here, he plays a scientist named Daniel Gray who's part of a secret government project to collect dark matter in space.  (I'm not quite sure what "dark matter" is, but it's one of those neat things like wormholes that you don't really have to understand in order for it to be a cool subject for a sci-fi flick.)  Seeing Stephen Baldwin in a lab coat is like seeing a gorilla wearing a tutu--somehow, the two just don't go together.  I kept expecting his associate Dr. Fred Flintstone to show up at some point so they could sneak out and go bowling together.

Anyway, this project is supposedly being done to benefit Mankind somehow, but the weaselly guy in charge of it, Dr. McKray (Gardiner Millar), turns out to be a dirty rat who's planning to turn the whole thing into a deadly weapon and sell it to the highest international bidder.  While demonstrating it to the visiting General Killion (William B. Davis, better known as Cancer Man from "The X-Files"), who controls the government purse-strings that finance the project, a containment leak in the orbiting dark-matter-collecting satellite is detected and a cloud of dark matter is spreading over the atmosphere.  (Sorry, but I'm just going to have to keep saying "dark matter" a bunch of times during this review.)
 

Dr. McKray doesn't want to lose his funding so he forces the reticent Dr. Baldwin and his coworkers to ignore safety measures and proceed with the demonstration, which causes the dark matter to enter our atmosphere at different points known as "spikes", wreaking all sorts of havoc with the weather and disintegrating airplanes and buildings and stuff.  This is done using that TV-quality kind of CGI that looks pretty good in some scenes and so hot at all in others.

Not only that, but Dr. Baldwin gets exposed to some errant dark matter himself during the botched test, which gives him strange super-powers that enable him to start his car without keys, lob dark-matter fastballs at bad guys, and repel focused beams of destructive dark matter with his mind.  He's Dark Matter Man!  This, too, turns out to be part of the repulsive Dr. McKray's plan to turn himself and everyone else into a race of dark-matter superbeings in order to bring Mankind's evolutionary process to its ultimate peak.  Wow--sounds just crazy enough to work!

It's interesting seeing William B. Davis as a good guy for a change, but without those fake cigarettes he used to chain-smoke on "The X-Files" he doesn't really know what to do with his hands anymore.  Camille Sullivan (THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT), who looks and sounds a bit like Sarah Jessica Parker but I didn't hold it against her, is okay as Dr. Baldwin's wife Ellie, and Keegan Connor Tracy (WHITE NOISE, FINAL DESTINATION 2) does a fairly good job playing the nasty agent of an unnamed government bidding for the dark-matter weapon.  I liked Rob LaBelle (FIDO, "Taken") as Dr. Baldwin's dorky associate Andy--he reminded me of a skinnier, shorter-haired Larry from the Three Stooges. 

Some of the dark-matter storm scenes are pretty cool but there are just enough shots of calamity and destruction, with varying degrees of cartoony-ness, to remind us that this is going on while the talkier, less-expensive scenes take up more running time.  Dr. McKray eventually has Dr. and Mrs. Baldwin kidnapped and taken to his secret dark-matter destructo-beam installation, and it's up to them to find a way to foil his evil scheme.  It all builds to a final super-powered showdown, with predictable results.

I liked EARTHSTORM better because its "Buck Rogers"-type space shuttle mission and other cheesy sci-fi elements were brighter and more fun.  DARK STORM, which is darker, more earthbound, and  a bit dreary at times, is a fairly entertaining time-waster and I didn't hate it, but that's about it.