A 30-Year-Old Virgin and More in Stuff I Watched!🎬😍

The stuff I watched since the last time!

The Late Bloomer:  A 30-year-old sex therapist has never even had an erection, let alone had sex with someone.  After a night out, he finds out that the reason for this is a tumor in his brain has kept testosterone from flowing through his body, essentially arresting him in prepubescence.  When the tumor is removed, all the sudden he starts going through puberty with the sexual urges, pimples, changing voice, and all that stuff. (And though they can't show it presumably his privates have gotten bigger.)  This complicates things at his practice and with the girl he's seeing.  It's mostly funny and occasionally poignant. (3.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  My books The Changing Seasons and Virgin Territory deal with a similar condition.)

The Accountant:  I'd wanted to see this for a while just for the irony, being an accountant and all.  Overall the movie is too long with too much going on that doesn't all really add up unless maybe you're like Ben Affleck in the movie.  He's an accountant who also kills people for money or expensive paintings.  He takes a job in Chicago to analyze a robotics company's books and in a single night does a whole Beautiful Mind thing on the windows to figure out some of what's going on with their books.  There's also a girl he takes on the run when other killers (led by Jon Bernthal) come after them.  There's also a lot of stuff with two IRS agents led by JK Simmons that doesn't really contribute a whole lot to the overall story.  It's the kind of movie that would be better if it were about 30 minutes shorter with some of the unnecessary backstory trimmed out. (2.5/5)  (Fun Facts:  Affleck and JK Simmons are going to be appearing in several movies together now that one is playing Batman and the other Commissioner Gordon.  Since you also have Bernthal who's the Punisher now, wouldn't that be a far more interesting movie?  Batman v Punisher:  Lots of Shit Dies.  But you'd have to cross Marvel and DC universes and God forbid we do something cool like that.  Also, the movie is executive produced by Steven Mnuchin, the weasel Trump tapped to be Secretary of Treasury, which seems kind of ironic.)

House of Wax (2005):  I never saw the original of this but this updated version wasn't very good.  It starts with the cliche "our car broke down in a creepy place populated by weirdos who want to kill us" shtick.  In this case the weirdos are rednecks whose mother was trying to build an entire town out of wax and so her spawn have been turning real people into wax sculptures to populate it.  One thing I wondered at the end was whether you could really make a multi-level building out of wax.  I guess wax doesn't usually melt until about 200 degrees, but how load-bearing is it?  I mean, wouldn't you need something for a frame around the wax?  I just put more thought into that than the writers did.  The writers are so lame they couldn't even work Paris Hilton's "that's hot" catchphrase into her dialog.  It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger not saying "I'll be back." Lame. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  This movie kept disappearing and reappearing from my Netflix queue for like 5 years so I finally got around to watching it.)

SWAT:  Firefight:  This lame straight-to-video sequel to the forgettable SWAT movie has an LA SWAT guy go to Detroit (actually Detroit, not Canada or something) to train Detroit's SWAT team and get them Federally certified.  But then they piss off some government spook by not stopping his girlfriend from killing herself or something and he tries to kill them.  It was pretty lame. (1/5)

The Invisible Man Returns:  This sequel to the original Invisible Man has Vincent Price play the brother to the Claude Rains character from the old movie.  He's accused of murder and so a doctor friend gives him the invisible man serum so he can get out and prove his innocence.  At least that's what I thought it was about.  It was pretty boring. (1/5)

I.T.:  Pierce Brosnan is a private jet company CEO planning to expand.  When a presentation goes awry he asks an IT temp for help and soon the temp is stalking him and his family, largely through their "smart house" systems and phones.  He even records the daughter flicking her bean in the shower if you know what I mean.  Since the daughter is 17 it's kind of creepy. Other than the smart house and phone aspect it's not really anything you haven't seen in other stalker movies before.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  In a Simpsons Halloween episode segment about 18 years ago Pierce Brosnan voiced a smart house that went rogue and fell in love with Marge and tried to kill Homer.)

Without a Paddle:  A guy dies and his 3 childhood friends (Matthew Lillard, Dax Sheppard, and Seth Green) decide to undertake the trip to find DB Cooper's stolen money that he always wanted to go on.  Then they're chased by bears and rednecks and so forth.  There could have been a good movie in there about the buddies reconnecting and growing up if the movie had decided to go in a more mature route instead of slapstick and poop humor. (1.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Pretty much all the main characters in the movie have guest starred on Seth Green's Robot Chicken at some point.)

Gridlocked:  A New York cop gets teamed up with a movie star who got in trouble for assault.  And then they go to some secret prison (or something) with some other people and then bad guys show up.  Like a Die Hard movie the bad guys are really just after cash.  It was all pretty boring but I'll give them a point for when Danny Glover says, "I knew I was too old for this shit" which is of course a reference to the Lethal Weapon movies. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Star Dominic Purcell and bad guy Vinnie Jones look so much alike that I couldn't tell them apart when they fought.  Also they were both villains on CW superhero shows, Purcell on The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow and Jones in Arrow.)

Jane Got a Gun:  In New Mexico in 1871 a woman's life is interrupted when her husband comes back badly wounded thanks to a gang of bad dudes.  She meets up with a former fiance and they fix up the house for a last stand.  Flashbacks help to fill in the time and establish the love triangle.  As far as Westerns go it's OK but not great. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Ewan MacGregor is unrecognizable as the head bad guy.  He reunites with Natalie Portman from the Star Wars prequels.)

The Hateful Eight:  I don't really like Quentin Tarantino movies but I've watched most of them.  This is the 8th one I guess and like Django Unchained it takes place in the late 19th Century.  A bounty hunter is taking a woman to Red Rock, Wyoming to hang, though he could have saved us all about 3 hours if he'd just killed her.  I mean the reward is "Dead or Alive" so it's the same either way, but it's some kind of point of honor with him.  Anyway, there's a blizzard and they have to stop at a "haberdashery" or inn, where there are some other people.  And then people start dying and secrets are revealed.  It all moves at a snail's pace, with lots of excess blabbing because critics told Tarantino he's good at dialogue.  There's also an excessive amount of blood and gore to make this akin to a torture porn movie.  For some reason there's a narrator after about 90 minutes, which really makes no sense.  Cut it about in half and it would be OK. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Appropriately this features actors from several of Tarantino's other movies:  Samuel L Jackson of course has been in almost all of them, but also Michael Madsen from Reservoir Dogs, Tim Roth from Pulp Fiction, and Kurt Russell from Deathproof.  Maybe some of the others were in other Tarantino movies but I'm not going to bother to look it all up.)

Spawn:  I've seen it before but not since I read the first volumes of comic books and watched the HBO show.  From those I guess it would have been hard to do something like that since they spent a lot of time navel-gazing in those.  This tries to be more action-oriented but the plot makes little sense, John Leguizamo is painfully irritating, and the effects look really lame.  I guess maybe at some point they'll take another crack at it, though I guess right now it's in "development hell," which seems appropriate for a hero from Hell.  (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Frank Welker, the voice of Megatron in the Transformers cartoon, Dr. Claw in Inspector Gadget, and tons of other stuff is the voice of Malebolgia the devil.)

Funhouse Massacre:  a dude breaks out a bunch of killers from a secret prison and they take over a funhouse to kill lots of people.  Of course at first no one believes it's real but eventually they catch on.  The bad guy's henchwoman makes Harley Quinn look like the Tooth Fairy.  There's lots of blood, gore, and horror movie cliches.  But I guess it's OK for all that. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The warden of the secret prison is played by Robert Englund, aka the original Freddy Krueger.)

Sky High:  This Disney movie is kind of a live-action mix of The Incredibles and Big Hero 6.  A kid is the son of the world's two greatest superheroes, which entitles him to go to the eponymous school for superheroes.  Except he has no powers yet!  So he gets lumped in with the kids who have no powers or relatively useless ones like being able to glow or turn into a puddle who are destined to be sidekicks.  But when confronted by a bully his super strength kicks in, which catapults him into the cool kid circle and creates friction between him and his sidekick buddies.  When a villain unleashes her master plan, only the sidekicks can save the day!  It's a strictly PG affair but it's fun without being too campy.  And there's a good cast including Kurt Russell, Kelly Preston, Bruce Campbell, Jim Rash, and Lynda Carter, who quips at one point, "What am I supposed to do?  I'm not Wonder Woman!"  You know, because she was Wonder Woman. Ha. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  The Flash's Danielle Panabaker plays the main kid's best friend and Patrick Warburton of The Tick provides the robot voice of the villain.  And of course Kurt Russell will be rejoining the Disney superhero ranks in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 this May.)

Kingdom of Spiders:  The same year Star Wars was sweeping the nation, William Shatner starred in this lame movie about spiders (tarantulas mostly) taking over a small Arizona town.  This was the Rifftrax version which is the only way this overstuffed, underscary movie could be tolerable.  But for Bill I suppose it was a good excuse to ride horses and get paid for it. (2/5)

Cyber Tracker:  This lame 1994 movie is a combination of Terminator and Judge Dredd.  In a dystopian version of what would now be the present, cybernetic bad guys can be dispatched to kill someone.  When Don "The Dragon" Parker (that's how his name is listed in the credits) runs afoul of these "cyber trackers" he's recruited into a resistance group that's mostly teens who should be posing for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.  They take on the cyborgs (and an Aussie with a knife who isn't Crocodile Dundee) in a lot of unspectacular fights with highly explosive cars.  This was the Rifftrax version, which again makes it a lot more fun than just making fun of it yourself--as you surely would.  (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  According to this, our present was supposed to have a lot of blue lighting--maybe KMart took over the world's light fixture suppliers?--and computers that are huge Commodore 64-type keyboards with tiny screens.  The videophones are pretty standard for any 80s/90s sci-fi movie and yet we still don't have widespread videophones I guess because of cell phones.  That's just as well as most times I don't really want to see who I'm talking to and I wouldn't want them seeing me.)

Icebreaker:  This was probably pitched as Die Hard meets Cliffhanger but really it's more Die Hard meets Ski Patrol, the lame early 90s movie that was like Police Academy on skis.  A year before he started walking to Mordor, Sean Astin stars in this lame production as a bumbling ski rescue guy who's hooking up with a rich chick.  Then his resort is invaded by a bald Bruce Campbell and some European and Canadian goons who wanted some nuclear bomb someone left there and then they're going to...it never really made any sense.  Like the previous two movies this was a Rifftrax version to make the nonsensical plot, lame jokes, and lamer action scenes a little more palatable. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  One bad guy's idea of the perfect food was cutting open Fig Newtons and spreading apricot jam on them.  Not sure why that never caught on.)