This is a new series from Spain, AKA Turkish Passion. As you probably know, passion is Turkey’s #2 export, right after taffy.
Areola-slip?
Defoe’s film clip is here
Muriel Combeau in episode 3
Eleonore Costes in episode 1
Defoe’s film clips are here
Esther Wahl in episode 1
Kelly Depault in episode 2
Stephanie Gil in episode 1 (left) and 2 (right). Non-nude
Defoe’s 720p film clips are here
“Musselman said CHP has also seen dummies and plastic skeletons as a way for single drivers to use the HOV carpool lane. In August, a Bay Area driver was busted for using a realistic-looking mannequin in a Highway 101 carpool lane.”
The professor offered the following bullshit explanation:
“Students will analyze what makes a good parody, learn how to pay homage to other artists and learn about the social context when Yankovic skyrocketed to fame in the 1980s and 1990s. It just gives us an avenue to start studying the 20th century and pop culture in the 20th century.”
The article offered the following actual explanation:
“Professor Warwick has worked with Yankovic in the past and considers him a friend.”
This is a remake of the legendary Patrick Swayze film from the 80s, this time starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Dalton. It follows the same general pitch-line as the original:
Thoughtful tough guy is hired to clean up a local bar terrorized by some thugs. The baddies are employed by a local plutocrat who wants to scare the roadhouse owner away for some greedy reason or another.
Gyllenhaal is an accomplished performer, and Doug Liman is the established, respected director of such films as The Bourne Identity, so the film is professional and workmanlike. The action set pieces are excellent and sometimes epic. The fight scenes are filmed and choreographed skillfully.
Unfortunately, this film lacks the subversive humor, the batshit-crazy characterization, the offbeat dialogue, and the generally loony originality of the Swayze version. Swayze’s Dalton was a confident, well-to-do Doctor of Philosophy, steeped in Zen thought, master of every one of the martial arts. He wore Armani suits and drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes. The new Dalton is a mopey, broke, guilt-ridden ex-fighter who travels by Greyhound bus and probably buys his clothes at Goodwill.
Yawn.
“Roadhouse is a cinema classic and one of the most entertaining movies ever made. I doubt whether making a great comedy was the original intention, but as gamblers say, “The cards speak for themselves.” It is the White Trash Hamlet; the Redneck Romeo and Juliet; Macbeth with a Mullet; Much Ado about NASCAR; Timon of Athens, Georgia.
The new Road House is not that at all. If the first version seemed to be written by a literate, half-mad carnival geek while watching a monster truck rally, the new one seems to be written by a marketing manager with good A.I. software and a copy of “How to Sell Your Generic Script.”
Or to put it another way – the new one was created by taking the original Road House and stripping away all the fun.
————–
The nudity is as lackluster as the script, again paling in comparison to the sexy original. By clipping a tiny section of the 4K version, I can produce this:
But what you see as you watch the actual film is this:
Yawn again.
You older readers may remember Danielle from her juvenile roles on All in the Family and Archie’s Place, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination. She had grown up and filled out quite nicely by the time she did this topless scene, which was lensed just after her 19th birthday. (IMDb says it was filmed in July of 1988, and she was born June 28, 1969. Her previous topless scene, in Big Bad Mama II, was lensed in April of 1987 per IMDb, when she was still 17.)
I had assumed that we would never see this straight-to-vid release on a Blu-Ray, because it was never even issued on DVD, but here it is, from Dark Force Entertainment, which specializes in forgotten films like this. This Blu-Ray is not some cheap rip-off, like an upscaled VHS tape. Dark Force must have scored an original print or negative, because the quality is solid. This is the second recent high-quality Blu-Ray release that caught me by surprise, the other being The Man Who Wasn’t There, which featured extensive nudity from Lisa Langlois. Perhaps there is a film restorer obsessed with women whose last names end in -ois.
The movie itself had been forgotten for a good reason: it is fourth-rate in every respect. For viewers interested in matters unrelated to quality, Kill Crazy does include a few guilty pleasures.
First, there is the topless nudity from Danielle and an actress named Rachelle Carson, who later married Ed Begley, Jr. Ms. Carson is still active in films and TV, and I think this was her only nudity in a long career. Brisebois left acting to concentrate on her music career, in which she got the Oscar nomination that had eluded her as an actress. (2015. Best Original Song; for “Lost Stars” from Begin Again.)
Second, the cast includes some nostalgic choices. There are two of the sweathogs from Welcome Back, Kotter: Epstein and Washington. There is Laugh-In’s Gary Owens. There is Burt Ward, who played Robin in the campy Batman show. Those people are not just nostalgic from today’s perspective. They were already nostalgic choices when this film was released in 1990, since their heyday was in the sixties and seventies. Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) never became a major star, but he has endured and is still in demand today at age 70. Burt Ward still shows up now and then, often as a mature Dick Grayson or as Robin’s voice in cartoons, even though he is nearly 80 years old. Epstein (Robert Hegyes) and Gary Owens are no longer with us.
Danielle Brisebois
Rachelle Carson, now known as Rachelle Carson-Begley
“Check out some nudity from Big Brother 15 (Australia) with lots of hot babes”
Lzzy Hale is the lead vocalist from Halestorm
“Amelia Gray Hamlin wearing a see-through gold dress to the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills!”
Sample:
“Khloe Kardashian made jaws drop as she attended Kylie Jenner’s Sprinter soda launch event.”
Sample:
“You! You there!” he shouted to a boy on the street. “What day is this?”
The boy gave a puzzled look. “It’s Shatmas, sir.”
“Good! I haven’t missed it. Here, lad. There’s a big, juicy turkey of a Shatner movie in the bargain bin at Walmart. Buy it and deliver it to my house.”
There are those who, with apologies to pretenders like Alexander Graham Bell and the not-as-great Gretzky, call Bill Shatner the greatest of all Canadians. That’s nonsense. Why restrict his importance to a single frozen land with fewer than 40 million inhabitants? He is simply the greatest HUMAN, possibly excepting the anonymous inventor of the wheel, and of course Bobby Troup.
Today is his 93rd birthday, or as I call it, New Year’s Day. Different people reckon the start of the new year with different methods, and have varying ways to calculate how many there have been. At the end of September in our calendar, the Jewish community will welcome the year 5785. The Chinese just celebrated the beginning of 4721. In a site dedicated to crap, we have no choice but to count the birth of William Shatner as the beginning of time (or at least any time worth living in), so today is the beginning of the year 93 A.S. (Anno Shatner).
Referencing the great day to the common calendar, the day known to most of the world as March 22, 1931 was the greatest day in history, for it marked the birth of the promised one … the golden child … the chosen one. Know him. Embrace him. For as surely as crapped is the past tense of crap, Shat is the past tense of shit.
Like most of his followers, I celebrate by getting into costume and re-enacting one of his many career highlights. I normally choose this all-time classic:
During the pandemic I could not re-create that fight, since the scene requires two actors, which was inappropriate in the era of Coronavirus and social distancing, so that year I chose to re-enact the fight scene from White Comanche, since Shatner plays both parts.
This year: The Scoopy Players, my community theater company, will present a stage version of Incubus, Shat’s offbeat 1966 movie performed entirely in Esperanto.
I did not make that film up. The entire movie is below.
Other tidbits:
1. Shat once recorded a Christmas album. He sang such classics as Feliz Navidad and Rudolph.
2. There are some great comments on the Shatmas page from 2022.
From the proprietor of a site that worships crap, stay crappy, Bill. You have already lived long and prospered, so just keep up the … er … good work.
The pitch:
“After a traumatic accident during a hypnosis session, Louise, a young psychiatrist, opens a new office in the middle of nowhere. When she starts analyzing Theo, a dark and mysterious man, people around her start to die.”
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while a mediocre movie turns out to be more enjoyable than a great one you can admire or a bad one you can laugh at. This happens because the film’s creators leave behind a trail of crumbs, through absurd situations or dialogue, or just through subversive hints, that demonstrate that they are winking at us, that they really didn’t take their subject matter seriously, and are laughing right along with us. There were a lot of these films in the 80s and 90s. If Road House is the king of ridiculously entertaining mediocrity, the princes would be Wild Things and Lair of the White Worm. Any sensible critic would tell you not to waste your time on such entertaining trash, and to turn your attention instead to filmmakers who care about the problems of the world, or at least about the importance of “cinema.”
Screw those critics, and the academy that looks down with disdain on entertainment. I love this kind of film.
Here is the full gallery, including a link that allows you to download all the pics together in a zip file. That link is on the top of the page, underneath the heading “(34 images)”
Some decades ago, Tuna and I had this to say about the film:
Scoop said (total spoilers):
Late in his life, Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula, wrote the story upon which this film is (very loosely) based. It’s about a giant white snake that has lived in a series of subterranean English caves and caverns since Roman times, fed by a cult of immortal snake-worshippers who bring it virgins. I’m not sure why the virginity is necessary. I mean the frigging snake is a carnivore. What’s he gonna do if he shows up hungry and the high priestess brings him a tasty 18 year old who got laid once at her Homecoming Dance? Is he gonna get finicky and refuse to eat, like Morris the Frigging Cat, until he gets the properly unsullied Snake Chow?
Anyway …
The snake-people work exactly like vampires. When they bite humans, they can turn the humans into fellow snakepires, or they can kill them.
Hugh Grant is the star, but he’s not a snakepire. He’s some kind of old money aristocrat with a Stately Hugh Manor located conveniently adjacent to venerable Snakepire-upon-the-Moors-and-Heaths-and-Heather. Amanda Donohoe is the head snakepire, an aristocratic head of the snake cult, and owner of the world’s only scary, rotting old castle with a built-in tanning bed. I haven’t read the book, but I think Bram Stoker died before WW1, so there may not have been a tanning bed in the original story. Or maybe Stoker was one of those visionaries like Leonardo or Jules Verne, and could predict the modern world’s need for tanning beds for vam- and snake- pires. After all, it makes sense. Creaturepires never go out in the sun, so how else can they look normal among their fellow sybarites? If they didn’t tan they’d have to spend their entire lives in the company of Rose McGowan.
Surprisingly, Ken Russell directed this. Remember him? He’s the guy who did all the biographies of famous decadent musicians who dreamt about masturbating nuns. Russell brought kind of a savage head-in-the-gutter iconoclasm to his best works, like his adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon, but all that raw energy is converted here into High Camp.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Russell’s favorite gimmick is to look inside the dreams and visions of his characters, and he uses that schtick here to show a lame Hugh Grant fantasy abut catfighting airline stewardesses, all of which has almost nothing to do with the plot in either meaning or tone. In the campiest of the film’s moments, Grant is doing a crossword puzzle on the plane when the evil stewardess and the good stewardess break into their fight. The pencil in Hugh’s lap keeps pointing farther and farther upward as he watches the catfight. I didn’t make that up. It really is exactly what happened.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say there weren’t any stewardesses in the original Bram Stoker story.
Eventually the good guys manage to defeat the snakepires, of course. How do they do it? You won’t even believe it when if I tell you, because it sounds like the kind of crap I’d make up, but I’ll tell ya anyway.
First of all, they play snake-charmer music, copying a plot from an old Batman episode. Hugh Grant has some old 78s lying around Stately Hugh Manor, which is not illogical. What is surprising is that he just happens to have about a zillion high-powered amplifiers lying around. Apparently he was expecting to host a Metallica concert in his back yard. That Bram Stoker really was a visionary! Of course, Stoker himself preferred AC/DC, and he would often argue in the Astral Plane with Nostradamus and Dionne Warwick and the other psychics who preferred Metallica or The Dead.
The plan works temporarily, but the snakepires have a counter-plan. They hoodwink Stately Hugh’s butler, and commandeer the record player. Those fiends!
The good guys then need to find another way to generate snake-charming music. They elect to use bagpipes. Conveniently, there’s a Scottish archeologist visiting Stately Hugh Manor. He has his pipes and his kilt with him on his archeological expedition. As we all know, Scotsmen never travel without those things. The snakepires can’t attack as long as the pipes are keening the greatest snake-charming hits. Or maybe the snakepires just hate bagpipe music. I know if I were a snakepire, I would give a wide berth to pipers. I know this because I already give them a wide berth. The bagpipe strategy works, but the good guys can’t be content to merely stave off the evil by charming the snake and his faithful snakepires. That’s only a stop-gap measure. They need a way to defeat the evil. Although they are in the rural English countryside, they somehow come up with a mongoose to release in Lady Snakepire’s estate. I didn’t make that up. About 15 minutes or so after Stately Hugh and the bagpipe-playing archeologist found out about the snakepires, they had rustled up a snake-destroying mongoose.
Oh, yeah, and the bagpiping archeologist also happens to have some grenades. I guess he’s a bagpiping paramilitary archeologist. He drops one of them into the mouth of the titular White Worm when it comes up to eat a virgin, and there you have it.
Tuna said:
The Lair of the White Worm (1988), according to IMDB, and every reviewer I checked, is a Corman-style horror/exploitation film directed by Ken Russell, and most wonder why the hell he made it. They consider it far too normal compared to his usual work. If I saw it as a horror film, I would reach the same conclusion. Several things about it are puzzling, though, if it is to be evaluated as a grade B horror film.
What is the wormpyre (female villain) doing with a home tanning machine in her dusty castle? Why the Snakes and Ladders board game, or a boy scout being the first victim we see? Consider this line from Hugh Grant, “I see you like our local speciality. Not everyone takes to marinated earth worms in aspic.” Then there is the pencil getting a hard-on during the flight attendant catfight fantasy sequence. When Russell solved the mystery of what Scotsmen wear beneath their kilts once and for all – a mongoose – I finally knew what he was on about. This is a comedy send-up of the genre. Possibly I am bent the same way as Russell, but I love Crimes of Passion, which many think of as one of his lesser films, and I thought this comedy was hilarious. Two virgin sisters run a bed and breakfast owned by Hugh Grant, lord of the manor. Peter Capaldi is an archeologist staying at the B&B and excavating in the front yard, where he finds proof of a convent, then, lower, a worm skull and Roman coins. As Hugh Grant explains, “worm is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon ‘wirm’ meaning dragon or snake.” Seems there was a famous worm slain by Grant’s ancestors, and wormpyre Amanda Donohoe is a modern day worshiper of the beastie. Donohoe’s bites can turn people into worm food, or other wormpyres.
Words like “campy” and “tongue in cheek” apply here. It is clearly not just a “so bad it is funny” film, in that it has good pace, good performers, and is a very easy watch. Music also helps to make this film. Capaldi uses the pipes to charm the beastie (until he runs out of breath) and the Celtic rock ode to the worm is a masterpiece. Taken as a genre spoof, this is a very good effort. I must temper that assessment by noting that the humor went over (or under) the heads of most viewers, and many reviewers took it too seriously, so your mileage may vary.
From celeb-stalker:
This is one of my favourite reality TV shows with lots of explicit nudity and its now in 8th season on British TV. You can check out all the episodes in full HD (Warning – some episodes are featuring gay men and women , bisexuals , transgender etc.)
… also the presenter of the show Anna Richardson and her (former) lesbian partner and famous comedian, Sue Perkins.