TULLY (2018) ***

After director Jason Reitman directed the hilarious Young Adult, he went on to make two box office duds in a row with Labor Day and Men, Women, and Children.  He then decided to get the band back together again and reunite with Young Adult's screenwriter Diablo Cody and star Charlize Theron for the charming and funny Tully. 

Theron stars as a put-upon mom with two bratty kids and another one on the way.  Sensing she’s overwhelmed, her brother (Mark Duplass) tries to set her up with a nanny as a shower gift, but she refuses.  Eventually, the baby arrives, and after a couple weeks of all-nighters with the kid, she realizes she needs help.  So, Tully (Mackenzie Davis) shows up and not only helps take care of the baby but also gets Theron’s mojo back.  She works so many wonders for Theron that it’s almost like she’s too good to be true. 

It’s amazing how much they mom up Theron in this and she still looks hot.  She’s equally good during the scenes where she’s struggling to get by as she is in the scenes where Tully has helped her find her center.  As the title character, Davis finds the right balance of Manic Pixie and Down to Earth Hippie.  She also has plenty of chemistry with Theron to boot.  The vastly underrated Ron Livingston is also great as Theron’s go-with-the-flow husband. 

Tully is a sweet and sincere film.  I was maybe taken a little aback by that since Cody’s movies are usually snarky.  I kept waiting for the cynicism to creep in, but it never really did.  Sure, there are some zingers here and there.  However, the emotions and relationships are all genuine.  Plus, it’s kind of nice having a movie about two women just kind of hanging out and shooting the shit. 

It’s all kind of low key and lightweight.  The twist ending probably wasn’t necessary, but it doesn’t really detract from the overall enjoyment.  (If I say what movie it rips off, it will spoil the surprise.)  If you ever spent a sleepless night with a crying baby, you probably wouldn’t mind a gal like Tully.  She’s chill, easy to talk to, and is a never-ending fount of useless trivia.  I dug having her around, even if it was for a short amount of time. 

Oh, and I didn’t really plan this, but after Tully and the anime porno Professor Pain, that makes two movies I watched in two days where painful lactation is a plot point. 

VENUS 5 (1994) ***

Animation can take us on flights of fancy in ways that live-action can’t.  It can show us such sights as naked girls chained to the wall and pleasured by lizard monsters, a dominatrix giving a cat (actually an alien disguised as a cat) a blow job, a monster gangbang (one has a dick shaped like the head of Giger’s Alien), candles up the ass, and a Roman emperor zombie shoving fruit into schoolgirl’s orifices.  It’s also not bad for more traditional shit like bondage, whipping, orgies, and… uh… tentacle porn. 

Venus 5 is basically an anime porn parody of Sailor Moon.  An exclusive boarding school holds a formal ball to welcome their new professors.  The professors are actually in league with an evil hermaphroditic empress named Necros who is the dean of the school.  Venus 5 are five high school girls with magical powers who are sent to stop them from resurrecting a demon (who’s also the dean’s father).  Together, they learn to harness their power and work as a team to overcome the evil villainess. 

Like Professor Pain, this was another anime porno I got from the thrift store.  Like that flick, it’s also two episodes of a series edited together.  This time, the episodes are forty-five minutes long each.   Because of that, it does drag a bit in places, especially in the second episode.  It also has more plot than was probably necessary for something like this.  While it is a riff on Sailor Moon, it does its thing fairly well too.  The nude transformation scenes are also fun. 

It helps that Necros is a strong villain.  In the beginning, we see her hanging out in a lair that was basically Stonehenge if Stonehenge was made with rock phalluses.  It’s a shame she never goes back there because I thought it was kind of funny. 

Some of the dialogue is really something too.  My favorite line was when the evil headmistress said, “I anoint your coffin with my love juices as an offering!”  Like I said, animation can take us on flights of fancy. 

AKA:  Venus Five.  AKA:  Sailor Soldier Venus Five.

PROFESSOR PAIN (1998) ***

I don’t usually find Japanese anime porn at the thrift store, but when I do, you bet your ass I pick that shit up.  The old lady behind the counter was mortified that something like this could have found its way onto the shelves.  In fact, at first, she acted like she wasn’t going to sell it to me, possibly on moral grounds.  Eventually, the allure of a crisp five-dollar bill made her change her tune.   Capitalism prevailed. 

Professor Pain begins with a bunch of Japanese schoolgirls trying to gang rape a nerdy student with a mop.  Maybe the old lady at the thrift store had a point.  Anyway, a demented professor threatens to blow up the school if the students don’t cave in to his demands.  He then proceeds to teach the students “lessons” to make them fall in line.  Such lessons include making a girl pee into a test tube, sticking needles into a student’s breasts and clit, and rope bondage.  Later, a female professor is sent in by the police to make sure the girls are okay, and the professor has his assistants tie her up and force her to lactate.  It all ends with a big orgy that the professor videotapes and puts online, in hopes of selling the girls into sexual slavery. 

I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to Japanese anime porn, but this was way more hardcore than I was expecting.  (I guess I’m used to the live-action stuff with the fogged nether regions.)  Not only are the sex organs drawn in graphic detail, but there are also even POV shots from inside a woman’s vagina!  It’s all really weird and shocking.  Since it takes a lot to shock me, I’d say that’s a good thing.  

It’s only an hour long (which helps), as it’s essentially two episodes of a TV show edited together.  I will say the first episode is much better as the second is far less kinky (the breast milk scene notwithstanding) and the flashback scenes that explain the professor’s motives sort of slow things down.  I don’t think it will exactly bring new members to the fold, but fans of S & M anime porn (you know who you are) will no doubt enjoy Professor Pain. 

AKA:  Sodom Academy.  AKA:  Professor Pain:  The Prisoners of the Campus.

THE PERILS OF PENELOPE (1994) ***

The Perils of Penelope is W.A.V.E. Productions’ loving tribute to the silent movie serials of old.  Silent movies and Shot on Video bondage flicks may seem like an odd pairing at first until you realize all those old shorts of women being tied to railroad tracks were basically the bondage films of their day.  In fact, the way director Gary Whitson updates the tropes is what makes the film so much fun.  For example, the silent movie cards are replaced by titles created by a video character generator.  The black and white photography is pretty good too and is a welcome change from so many grainy W.A.V.E. movies. 

Penelope (Michelle Caporaletti) finds her grandmother’s diary and relives her perilous tales of escaping her scheming suitor Craven (Sal Longo) who tries to tie her up to a deadly buzzsaw.  When that fails, he ties her to the railroad tracks, but she escapes that too.  Later, Craven’s sisters take revenge by capturing Penelope and hanging her above a vat of boiling oil.  Other perilous predicaments involve a booby-trapped gun, an electric chair, suffocation, and a dark dungeon.  Eventually, Penelope must escape the clutches of Craven himself. 

The melding of old serials and bondage videos is certainly inspired.  Fans of the former will enjoy the fake-out cliffhanger endings at the end of each chapter, and bondage enthusiasts will enjoy the long, lingering close-ups of our heroine’s feet.  (You won’t see that in those old Saturday matinee serials, that’s for sure.)  The sequence on the railroad tracks is a lot of fun too, even if the shots of the train coming down the tracks are obviously that of a model train. 

After the first act, the action switches over to the present and the film forgoes the silent movie schtick, but it still retains the cliffhanger gimmick which is fine.  I guess Whitson didn’t want to stray too far from the usual W.A.V.E. formula.  Although some of this can get a little repetitive, if you are a fan of old school cliffhanger serials and/or W.A.V.E. movies, The Perils of Penelope will probably leave you with a silly grin on your face. 

HUNG JURY (1994) **

A small time criminal murders a woman.  He’s found guilty by a jury of his peers and is sentenced to be hanged.  Just before he is executed, he vows revenge on everyone who sentenced him.  Thirty years later, a killer begins brutally murdering women.  Meanwhile, a group of strangers travels to an island for a murder mystery weekend.  As it turns out, they are the children of the jury who passed sentence on the killer, and someone soon takes to bumping them off one by one. 

Hung Jury features such W.A.V.E. stock situations as wet T-shirts, actresses clearly reading from their script, women suffering from a prolonged death in a swimming pool, women tied up and gagged, actors flubbing lines, and hot actresses with nasally South Jersey accents.  Even for fans of this sort of thing (me included), a little of this goes a long way.  The problem with Hung Jury is that it’s just way too long for its own good.  Even big budget movies have trouble sustaining a one-hundred-and-fourteen-minute running time.  It’s that much harder for a no-budget Shot on Video enterprise to hold the audience’s attention for that long.  

Often times it feels like an assembly cut where the editor took every scrap of footage they had and edited all together, but for some reason, they forgot to cut it down.  (In fact, it sometimes feels like two films that have been spliced together.)  Scenes run on too long, and many shots are held longer than necessary.  There’s no sense of pacing as scenes just aimlessly play out.  It doesn’t help that there are also way too many subplots, which further eats up screen time. 

The good news is the body count is huge and the killer disposes of his victims in a variety of different ways.  There’s stabbing, strangulation, death by bondage, electrocution, axing, speargun skewering, crucifixion, and (of course) hanging.  My favorite bit was when a bodybuilder was beaten to death with the severed arm of her lover. 

Some of our favorite W.A.V.E. starlets appear, albeit briefly.  Clancy McCauley is the first victim and Tina Krause shows up as a model.  (It’s fun seeing her modeling various outfits from other W.A.V.E. productions.)  Too bad the rest of the cast are kind of forgettable. 

This is also one of those chaste W.A.V.E. movies.  Several times it comes so close to showing nudity before backing down.  (You can see the towel covering an actress in one scene.)  It’s like having women bound and gagged, drowning, and being hacked up is fine, but God forbid you show a nipple or two.  (Unless they’re barely visible from underneath a wet T-shirt that is.) 

Had director Gary Whitson added in some skin, this might’ve skated by with ** ½.  Had editor Sal Longo whittled the running time down to the bare essentials, the jury may have handed down a favorable verdict.  As it is, I can only pronounce it guilty of running on way too long. 

THE ORACLE (1985) ***

An old medium mysteriously disappears without a trace.  A young woman named Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers) moves into her apartment at Christmastime and finds her automatic writing planchette.  Before long, she’s receiving messages from beyond the grave from a ghost who wants her to avenge his death.  Meanwhile, a killer is stalking the streets of New York and preying on prostitutes. 

The Oracle was directed by Roberta Findlay, who had an interesting career.  She went from making roughies in the ‘60s with her husband Michael to hardcore movies in the ‘70s to horror and exploitation in the ‘80s.  If you dug this one, you should also check out Findlay’s Tenement and Blood Sisters, which were made around the same time. 

This would make a great horror flick to watch around the holidays.  There’s an effective scene where the killer cleans himself up after slaughtering a sex worker while an instrumental version of “Silent Night” plays on the soundtrack.  We also get a fun bit when our heroine is attacked during the New Year’s Eve countdown.  Findlay gives us some cool nighttime footage of 42nd Street in the ‘80s too. 

The… shall we say… “identity” of the killer is obvious from the get-go, and while it probably wouldn’t fly today, it feels right at home in a skeevy ‘80s horror flick.  Other oddball touches include the gnarly scene when the automatic writing board gives birth to creatures that look like a mutant version of those monster pencil toppers we used to have back in elementary school.  There’s plenty of blood and gore too, including a knife in the eye, decapitation, and face melting, which means it’s almost always entertaining. 

Powers is good as the hysterical woman haunted by spirits who dresses like a late 19th century candy store operator.  Roger Neil is especially memorable as her asshole husband who constantly belittles and condescends to her.  His beleaguered reactions to the supernatural shenanigans give the movie its biggest laughs.  Chris Maria De Koron is also amusing as the ill-fated Greek maintenance man. 

Apparently, Findlay wanted to use a Ouija board instead of the automatic writer, but Parker Brothers (who owned the copyright) wouldn’t let her!

DREAM SCENARIO (2023) ***

Nicolas Cage stars as a perfectly ordinary professor stuck in a rut.  His life changes drastically when for some mysterious reason he begins appearing in the dreams of perfect strangers.  As more and more people see him in their dreams, Cage becomes something of a minor celebrity.  Things take a turn for the worse for Cage when people’s dreams of him start turning into nightmares. 

Cage has been giving quirky and idiosyncratic performances for decades, so it’s nice when he finds a project just as quirky and idiosyncratic as he is.  He seems to be channeling the same energy he had in Adaptation for his sad sack loser character.  In fact, the whole thing kind of plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite.  The dream scenes are very well done as the little oddball details make most of the sequences feel like the real McCoy and not so much a movie version of a dream.  Cage also seems to be having a blast playing such a schlub, even if his character is a bit one-note (although that’s kind of the point).  He’s especially good in the later scenes when everyone (including his family) turns on him. 

The supporting cast is good too.  Julianne Nicholson makes for a fine contrast to Cage’s off-kilter energy as his bewildered wife.  I also enjoyed Tim Meadows as Cage’s boss as well as Michael Cera as his image consultant who tries to get him hired for Sprite commercials. 

Dream Scenario is at its best when Cage is dealing with his newfound fame since virtually everyone is dreaming of him.  The scenes of him being wooed by a woman (Dylan Gelula) who has explicit sexual dreams about him are particularly amusing.  The movie also plays with themes such as celebrity in the smartphone age, reality never meeting expectations, and cancel culture, although it stops short of making a big statement about any of them. 

It would’ve been nice if the film was a bit meatier and/or if Cage’s character had been more complex.  However, like dreams themselves, it’s odd and amusing.  And maybe a little forgettable.