Stuff I Watched Returns!

It's all the stuff I watched since the last time, which was way back on March 24th.

Live By Night:  Ben Affleck stars in, wrote, produced, and directed this gangster movie.  Affleck is a stick-up man who gets put in jail but thanks to his cop father (Brendan Gleeson) is out in three years.  He takes a job for an Italian gangster to take over the rum racket in Tampa.  There he meets Zoe Saldana and they fall in love but the police chief's wayward daughter (Elle Fanning) makes things difficult by making the shut down of a proposed casino a big religious thing.  The film feels overly long, sagging in the middle and lingering too long at the end.  There's not really much you haven't already seen in The Godfather, The Untouchables, so on and so forth.  It's probably just as well that Affleck stepped aside from directing his Batman solo movie because you can see what happens when one guy is wearing too many hats. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Leonardo DiCaprio also produced the movie though he doesn't appear in it.)

The Founder:  Michael Keaton stars as Ray Kroc, the man who didn't create McDonald's but turned it into a household name.  He starts as a struggling milkshake machine salesman.  When McDonald's orders a bunch of the machines, he goes to San Bernadino to find people queued up for a block.  Dick and Mac McDonald show off their innovating process for serving burgers in 30 seconds or less.  Kroc then franchises McDonald's restaurants around the country, starting in his native Midwest, but the punitive contract he signed with the McDonald brothers makes it hard for him to turn a profit, until a lawyer gives him the idea to buy the land for the restaurants and lease it to franchisees.  It starts off as pretty light drama and then gets darker as he turns on the McDonald brothers and his wife, but Michael Keaton manages to keep the character likable even as he's being a total asshole.  Like most biopics I'm sure there's plenty of poetic license, but probably not as much as an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.  The funniest line of the movie is when Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman) says in response to Kroc wanting Coke to sponsor menu boards, "McDonald's isn't about crass commercialism."  I assume that was written for its irony.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Jeremy Renner produced the movie though he doesn't appear in it.)

Allied:  It starts off like a riff on Casablanca as Brad Pitt parachutes into French Morocco in 1942 and meets up with a member of the French Resistance (Marion Cottillon) who poses as his wife.  They get close as they set up an operation to assassinate the German ambassador.  After that operation they get married for real and go to England, where she gives birth to their daughter during an air raid in London.  But as D-Day approaches, Allied Command believes Brad Pitt's wife might be a German agent and want him to help smoke her out, but he's more interested in trying to prove her innocence.  Overall it's well-made and well-acted and the end wasn't too obvious.  Though that the end largely hinged on an airplane not starting like a car in a bad horror movie was kind of annoying.  (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  This was directed by Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame.  He also directed Brad Pitt's second ex-wife in Beowulf.)

Nocturnal Animals:  I ended up watching this twice because I forgot the Redbox disc at home and so if I were going to pay for 2 days I might as well watch it twice.  That was probably for the best as it helped to straighten things out because there's a movie within the movie and then flashbacks mixed in so you kinda need to pay attention to things.  Basically in grad school Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal got married but then got divorced a short time later when she ragged on his writing and aborted his child before running off with Armie Hammer.  20 years later Jake Gyllenhaal mails her a manuscript he's written.  This is the movie-in-the-movie where Jake Gyllenhaal plays a father whose wife and daughter are taken by some hoods on a West Texas highway and then later raped and murdered.  Michael Shannon is the cop who helps him track down those responsible.  Back in reality, Amy Adams is kind of freaked out by the book but she arranges to meet Jake Gyllenhaal, except he blows her off.  The End.  So yeah once you unravel the plot it's not all that great.  The Amy Adams parts tend to move at a glacial pace.  The movie starts by showing all these grotesquely overweight women dancing naked or in lurid poses; it turns out that they're installations for some art show, but it is just the worst way to start a movie.  Makes me glad I didn't watch this in the theater where I didn't have a fast forward button. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  In the movie-in-the-movie the Amy Adams part is played by Isla Fisher, which makes sense since I always mix them up.)

Masterminds:  This is "based on a true story" but I assume very loosely based.  It's directed by the director of Napoleon Dynamite so it's not exactly a crime drama.  It's mostly a slapstick comedy about a dumb guy in North Carolina who works for Loomis Fargo in 1997 and steals $17 million from their armored truck warehouse.  Then he goes on the run in Mexico while the "mastermind" of the scheme lives high on the hog back in Carolina.  There are some funny parts but it drags a little after the robbery.  Zach Galifinakis...or however you spell it--the guy from The Hangover--is the robber and Owen Wilson the "mastermind" but when they show the photos of the real life guys they really should have switched roles.  The cast also includes all of the female Ghostbusters except Melissa McCarthy. Jason Sudekis plays a hitman who is sent to kill the Hangover guy but doesn't because they share the same name--except the Hangover guy's I thought was just an alias. (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Owen Wilson's wife in the movie is played by "The Waitress" from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Her character actually gets a name in the movie.)

Legion:  I never really read the comic books this show is very loosely based off of, though I do know Legion is the son of Charles Xavier, the leader of the good mutants in the X-Men movies.  He's never mentioned by name, nor do they talk about anything in those movies, though they do make some references to his father that definitely sound like Professor X.  Anyway, David Haller hears voices and so he's in a mental hospital for schizophrenia, but really he's a powerful telepath like his father.  Except there's a weird entity called the "Shadow King"  latching onto him, trying to control him.  He's taken in by a place called Summerland where they try to teach him to use his powers.  Along with him is a woman named Sydney who has the power to temporarily swap bodies with people; David escapes the mental hospital when she touches him and he becomes her for a little while.  There are also bad guys known as Division 3 trying to kill them.  There's a lot of trippy stuff.  I was kind of annoyed when for two episodes near the end everyone was in the mental hospital being told nothing was real because I'd just watched the same thing in Ash vs Evil Dead Season 2 a few days earlier and remembered that same thing on DS9 in the 90s.  The cookie scene in the last episode sets up a mystery going into season 2.  Overall it was an interesting show.  It'd be good if they tied it more to the X-Men universe.  Maybe when they get some other shows they can start doing like the CW and crossing them over. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Dan Stevens plays the main character and his voice always sounds like Hugh Laurie's as Dr. House.  If I closed my eyes and you played clips of both I doubt I could tell them apart.)

Ash vs Evil Dead Season 2:  I watched the first season of this show last year during Comcast's Watchathon and so this year I watched the second season during the Watchathon week.  It was maybe a little improvement over Season 1.  At the end of that season Ash (Bruce Campbell) left the evil Necronomicon in the hands of Ruby (Lucy Lawless) and retired to Jacksonville to hang out and drink with his two younger buddies Kelly and Pablo.  But eventually some of Ruby's minions turn on her and she needs Ash's help, which draws him back to his hometown in "Michigan" (aka New Zealand, because they're totally the same, except for the mountains, ocean, hobbits, etc...) where he meets some old friends and his dad, played by Lee Majors.  It's pretty good.  Basically it maintains the Evil Dead schtick of mixing a lot of violence and gore with slapstick humor.  For fans there are also a lot of Easter eggs, like going back to the house from the first two movies and the appearance of Ted Raimi as Ash's buddy Chet; Ted Raimi is the brother of Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi and like Bruce Campbell usually shows up in Sam Raimi's movies like Darkman, the three Spider-Man movies, etc.  They even make a few references to Army of Darkness, the third movie they didn't really seem to mention in Season 1.  For non-fans like me it's pretty good, but like the movies can get tiresome.  The chainsaw duel near the end was pretty neat, though.  (2.5/5)

Superstore Season 2:  I watched the first season on Hulu last year and thought it was OK.  The second season I watched during Comcast's Watchathon was also OK.  It's still not as good as Parks & Recreation or Community but it's not terrible either.  I still think the mistake they make is having too much of the comedy driven by the employees instead of the customers.  That's fine for an office setting but in a retail setting there are so many weirdos out there.  I mean have you ever gone to Wal-Mart?  None of the characters really stands out all that much and I really wish they'd get a better boss character, someone who could be as good as Ron Swanson or Michael from The Office.  Still at least it's better than the laugh track dreck over on CBS. (2.5/5)

Super Mansion Season 2:  This stop motion superhero series from the creative team of Robot Chicken first aired on Crackle back in 2015 and then later on Cartoon Network.  The second season began airing this year and is a step up.  The plotting is tighter and more focused.  There are some big reveals, epic battles, and new characters to spice things up.  Most of the season revolves around Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston) and an invasion of people from his home of Subtopia deep within the Earth.  It becomes kind of like Superman II or Man of Steel then as he and the League of Freedom have to take on a bunch of superpowered beings.  It's just a shame there are only 10 episodes. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Community's Yvette Nicole Brown joined the cast in Season 2 as Portia Jones, an Oprah-like talk show host who also could become the goddess Zenith...who pretty much disappeared halfway through the season.  The rest of the season Zenith was unable to come out because of "trouble in the god's realm" which was kind of lame.)

The Unusuals:  This sounds like the title for a superhero show but it's actually a cop show that's kind of like a mix of gritty procedural like Law & Order or NYPD Blue and a cop comedy like Brooklyn 9-9 or Angie Tribeca.  It stars a pre-Hurt Locker Jeremy Renner as a detective who gets a new partner when his old one is murdered.  The new partner (Amber Tamblyn) is a rich, reformed party girl who became a cop.  Another cop is suffering from a brain tumor and his partner wears a bulletproof vest all the time because he's deathly afraid he'll die at 42 like his father and grandfather.  It's kind of an interesting show even as it mixes tone. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  In the second episode a bank robber is played by a young Miles Teller of Whiplash and Fant4stic.  The creator of this show also created FX's Legion)

Action:  This Fox series from 1999-2000 was ahead of its time for network TV.  There was plenty of bad language and sex with no laugh track like most comedies of the time.  Jay Mohr starred as movie producer Peter Dragon, whose latest big-budget movie flops.  Facing becoming a has-been, he has to make his next project work.  Then he meets a hooker who used to be a child star (Illeana Douglass, who I often confuse with Allison Janney) who helps him find the perfect script.  But that's about the only thing that goes right.  From there it's a series of disasters with a star who's a struggling addict and another who has body issues, a neurotic writer, and a director who dies.  Watching this would have been better if Crackle hadn't mixed up the order of the episodes.  This is the kind of series where you need to watch them in order to really understand what's going on.  Fox not surprisingly cancelled the show after 8 episodes.  As sort of a screw you to the audience they ended with Peter "dying" of a heart attack so viewers thought that's how the series actually ended.  They dumped the remaining 5 on FX later.  Anyway, some of the references are dated now, but it's otherwise a good show. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Originally this was going to be on HBO but Fox outbid them.  In hindsight HBO probably would have been a better home for it as they could have really gone all-out and they would have had less pressure ratings-wise than a major network.)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 The Return:  This Kickstartered Netflix series is a reboot of the old 80s/90s series.  It's basically a guy and mostly two robots making fun of a bad old movie.  The plot device is that a mad scientist (the daughter of the original mad scientist) is trying to continue her father's work on an unsuspecting spaceship pilot.  The effects are suitably cheesy.  Like any of the old series or Rifftrax or anything similar some jokes hit and some miss.  There are more hits than misses I'd say.  The first episode features a really cheesy Danish kaiju movie called "Reptilicus."  The monster is obviously a model and a part where he eats a guy looks like it was done with a cartoon.  There are about 20 episodes, which at 90 minutes apiece make bingeing a bit of a chore. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Original creator Joel Hodgson produced and co-directed the first episode.)

Powerless:  I watched the pilot of this and wasn't really very impressed.  It's supposed to be an office comedy set in the DC Universe.  Of course no major characters appear, but God knows they mentioned Bruce Wayne enough.  Which like in Supergirl where they kept mentioning "her cousin" it gets to be irritating because you know Ben Affleck isn't going to appear so unless they set it in a parallel universe and hire someone else they're just going to keep mentioning him without showing him.  None of the characters shown really seemed all that interesting and Vanessa Hudgens especially wasn't very good as the perky would-be Leslie Knope of the office.  Pilots can be pretty shaky, so maybe it'll come together later, but I don't really feel like finding out. (1/5)

The Road Warrior:  I think now I finally watched all of the Mad Max movies, though none of them really impressed me.  The plot for this one is pretty much the same as the two movies that came after it.  Max gets involved with a group of people and winds up helping them escape from a bad guy to go start life anew.  In this case he hooks up a big rig to a tank of fuel so a group of people can escape from "Humungus" (who looked like a bare-chested Jason Voorheis) and his minions.  There's a lot of car chases and not much dialogue, which is I guess what you expect.  Meh. (2/5)

The Man With X Ray Eyes:  This 60s Roger Corman film follows a pretty familiar formula:  scientist experiments on himself and things go to shit.  In this case the guy invents eye drops that let him see in other spectrums.  Somehow he kills his partner and has to go on the lam in a sideshow run by Don Rickles.  When Don Rickles is going to rat on him, though, he decides to go to Vegas and use his powers to cheat at cards.  Except he makes it painfully obvious he's cheating and so he gets run out of there, chased by cops, and ends up in a revival where his eyes explode or something.  Better effects and less cliche storytelling would have made this better but you can say that Corman is at least usually competent. (2/5)

Novocaine:  Steve Martin stars in this dark comedy about a dentist who gets involved with a drug addict and then is framed for murder by his assistant.  I didn't pay all that attention to most of it.  The end hinges upon Martin ripping out all the teeth in his mouth and leaving them in his dead brother's mouth before burning the place down so cops will think he's dead.  That's implausible for a number of reasons.  Even with Novocaine, it's hard to pull one tooth out let alone all 32 of them.  And the blood loss would probably kill you or make you faint before you could get out the door.   Even more implausible is that he writes a book under an assumed name and sells it for enough money for a chateau in France.  Ha.  We should all be so lucky. (2/5)

The Hollow Point:  In an Arizona border town (actually Utah) Mexican cartels are having rednecks smuggle bullets across the border.  When a deal goes sour, new sheriff Patrick Wilson has to find out who did what...and then gets his right hand cut off by a machete-wielding John Leguizamo.  Yeah, that's kinda unexpected.  I mean Leguizamo as the stone-faced, machete-packing tough guy?  Really?  Somehow Patrick Wilson is out of the hospital the same day to go and find Leguizamo and his conspirators, including a bloated Jim Belushi.  It's an OK action movie though it's hard to take it as seriously as it would like you to. (2.5/5)

The Beaver:  This was supposed to be Mel Gibson's big comeback film--at least on the screen.  It didn't really turn out that way.  And almost a decade later he still hasn't made that comeback as an actor, though Hacksaw Ridge bought him some credibility as a director.  Anyway, this is like a creepier, less slapstick version of Mrs. Doubtfire.  Mel Gibson is a depressed toy company exec who gets thrown out by his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed the movie) and finds a beaver puppet that he starts to use as a surrogate.  The device works for a little while as he connects with his younger son and much creepier fucks his wife in the shower with the beaver still on his hand--though turned away.    The movie also features the late Anton Yelchin as Gibson's teenage son who makes a lot of money writing papers for other students and who gets paid to write the valedictorian speech of a pretty, popular girl played by Jennifer Lawrence.  Drama ensues and some Twilight Zone-type weirdness where the puppet becomes more and more its own entity.  It's OK but not great.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Netflix captioning says the puppet uses a Cockney accent though I think it's more like the Australian accent Gibson had in Mad Max and other earlier films.)

Cold is the Night:  Alice Eve (that chick who ran around in her underwear in the second Star Trek reboot movie) is the manager of a dumpy motel.  Then Bryan Cranston and the Penguin from that crappy Gotham show check in, presumably to rest for a few hours but Penguin guy buys a hooker who then kills him.  His car is confiscated with a bunch of drug money in it so Bryan Cranston takes Alice Eve captive to get her help.  Cranston plays the role with a Russian accent and sunglasses because he's legally blind, which could be like a sequel to the Maragaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin:  The Legally Blind Assassin.  Anyway, it was OK but really Cranston's character goes out like a bitch, which was underwhelming.  In the end Alice Eve smuggles out some money in a turtle tank so she doesn't have to live in a dumpy motel anymore.  Yay! (2.5/5)

Come and Find Me:  Another Breaking Bad alum, Aaron Paul, stars in this thriller.  Aaron Paul and his girlfriend move into an old house and then one day he wakes up and she's a gone girl.  After more than a year a "friend" of hers comes over and starts knocking holes in walls to look for something.  Later Aaron Paul finds some photos she took that show Russian(?) gangsters and other people.  Long story short, she was working for the government.  It's OK, not really as messed up as Gone Girl.   The end is a bit cryptic.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was written and directed by Zack Whedon, the sibling of Joss I assume anyway.)

Midnight Meat Train:  Bradley Cooper is a photographer in New York who sees a woman disappear on a train.  Investigating this, he finds that a big, weird guy (Vinnie Jones) is murdering people on the train and literally butchering them, hanging them like sacks of meat and stuff.  He and his girlfriend work on different angles then to try to stop Vinnie Jones.  And eventually the find out that the train is run by a secret society to feed CHUDs or Mole People or some goddamned stupid thing like that.  It's based on a Clive Barker story so there's lots of blood and gore and of course not a happy ending. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  Ted Raimi from Ash vs Evil Dead--see above--is one of the victims.)

Animal Kingdom:  A boy's druggie mom overdoses and so he goes to live with his grandma and three ne'er do well uncles in Sydney.  They press him into the family business but when one of the uncles (Joel Edgerton) dies the kid is torn between his family and a cop played by Guy Pearce with a cheesy mustache.  But after one uncle (Rogue One's Ben Mendelssohn) kills the kid's girlfriend, he decides to take justice into his own hands.  It was interesting but I fell asleep in the middle of it and had to go back and watch the rest later, which isn't a ringing endorsement. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The kid should have choked Ben Mendelssohn to death since he's been choked out by both Darth Vader and Bane.  I'm just saying.)

The Guard:  Sort of a buddy cop movie about a local Irish cop (the Garda as they're known) played by Brendan Gleeson of Live By Night--see above--who gets help from an American FBI agent played by Don Cheadle.  They don't really have chemistry like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies but it is a fun pairing of small town street smarts and American technological analysis.  They have to work together to spoil a big drug deal led by Mark Strong (Kingsman, Green Lantern) and Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) that has also led to a couple of murders around the town.  Overall it's pretty good, like Lethal Weapon meets Hot Fuzz, though the ending is a bit cryptic as to weather one main character survives or not. (3/5)

Extras:  I'm not sure if there was an American version too, but this was the original BBC show.  Ricky Gervais is a struggling actor who along with his female friend gets work as an extra.  His epic quest is to get a line.  Each episode has a famous guest star including Ben Stiller, Kate Winslet, Samuel L Jackson, and Sir Patrick Stewart, who uses his connections to get Gervais's sitcom script a pilot on BBC.  In a way it's like a British version of the Seinfeld because a lot of the humor is from Gervais and his friend consciously and unconsciously offending people and digging themselves only deeper into social awkwardness.  As you might expect there's less slapstick humor and more subtlety than most American sitcoms. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  In the overly long Christmas Special Gervais plays an alien slug on Doctor Who and gets bested by David Tennant with a salt shaker.)

Hard Eight:  I had to watch this on YouTube years ago because Netflix, Blockbuster, etc didn't have it in stock.  It's the directorial debut of Paul Thomas Anderson, who went on to make movies like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.  Many of the actors in this later appear in those movies like Phillip Baker Hall, John C Reilly, and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  The premise is that Hall finds Reilly outside a restaurant and takes him under his wing as a gambler/con man in Reno.  But then Reilly falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow but things fall apart when she has sex with a guy who refuses to pay and they beat him up.  It's a decent movie, especially for a first film, with a noirish feel.  It's not as slow and bloated as some of Anderson's recent efforts. (3.5/5)

My Cousin Vinny:  I had never actually watched this before.  It's a good fish-out-of-water story as two kids are going to college when they're arrested for murder in rural Alabama.  One guy's mom calls his cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci) who has a law license but has never actually tried a case before.  He stumble bumbles his way through the trial before finally proving the kids innocent with help from his fiancee Marissa Tomei, who won an Oscar probably for kissing and sleeping with Joe Pesci.  It has to take real acting chops to find him attractive. (3/5)

They Live:  It's amazing how prescient this movie from 1988 was.  Its focus on class warfare and our consumption economy is more relevant than ever.  WWF superstar "Rowdy" Roddy Piper is a drifter who finds a pair of sunglasses that let him see that aliens (or ghouls as they're called in the credits) are controlling our world through subliminal messages and bribing those in charge.  With the help of Keith David, Piper takes down the system to let everyone see the true face of evil.  It would be a better movie with a real actor in the starring role, but otherwise even after nearly 30 years the message isn't dated at all. (3/5)

4:3:2:1:  4 female friends in London have 4 converging adventures over a weekend.  One's parents are splitting up and she's bummed about an abortion.  One is essentially raped by a guy she thinks is someone she's been talking to on the Internet.  One fails a driving test and gets locked in a panic room with her lesbian lover.  And one stumbles on a diamond smuggling ring in the market where she works.  Eventually it all ties together and they seemingly live Happily Ever After...except one of the diamond smugglers is probably going to murder them.  Yay? (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Kevin Smith has a small role as an overweight air traveler--get it?--and Alexander Siddig of DS9/Game of Thrones has a small role as one girl's dad and Mandy Patinkin has a small role as a piano teacher, but writer/director Noel Clarke gives himself the "And" credit.  Because he's done way more than those guys...um, maybe?)

The Big Kahuna:  This is the kind of movie that feels more like a play as it has only 3 actors (and some extras) and very few settings.  Kevin Spacey and Danny Devito are two veteran sales reps for industrial lubricants at a conference in Witchita.  They have a younger guy with them for the experience or whatever.  The title refers to some big CEO they're hoping to talk into a lucrative deal.  Except at the little get together they're throwing in a hotel suite the guy doesn't seem to show up.  But then they realize he was there and chatting with the young guy about religion and dogs for a while.  They dispatch the young guy to track the guy down and close the sale...except he's more interested in selling the guy on Jesus.  That's pretty much it.  Kevin Spacey dominates the movie with a lot of rapid fire snark and most of the movie Danny Devito is in the background, though he gets a nice soliloquy at the end.  It's OK but not really a whole lot going on. (2.5/5)

No Retreat, No Surrender:  In the mid-80s karate movies were en vogue and this shamelessly attempts to capitalize on that.  It starts in LA where some gangsters muscle a guy out of his karate dojo.  Because that seems like a sound business plan, right?  Maybe if you bulldoze the dojo for a Starbucks.  Anyway, the guy and his son Jason move to Seattle...which still looks like southern California.  Jason makes a black friend who has a jheri curl and since it was the mid-80s is into break dancing, another popular trend of the time.  And some fat kid takes an instant dislike to him.  Then Jason runs afoul of some kids at the local dojo because the most popular kid there's girl is into Jason.  What's funny is they mention that they know each other and met up at a pet shop in the mall and yet that's never shown on the screen, so I guess you take their word for it.  That's the level of filmmaking we're talking about here.  And then Jason calls on the spirit of Bruce Lee to teach him.  Some Asian guy who's supposed to be Bruce Lee then shows up at an abandoned house Jason turns into his clubhouse to run him through a bunch of drills.  These help him to defeat Jean-Claude van Damme, one of the gangsters who try to take over the Seattle dojo.  Another great investment, right?  This cheesy movie is made better by the Rifftrax treatment. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  The Bruce Springsteen song "No Surrender" features  the repeated lyrics:  "No retreat, baby, no surrender" which is probably where they got the movie title from, trying to capitalize on another popular trend.  I don't know if this is the secret origin of JCVD, but the director must have told him that he was a robot because he acts about as woodenly as Dolph Lundgren as Drago in Rocky IV--and their characters are both named Ivan!  Real original.  BTW, amazingly there was a sequel to this piece of crap.)