NO HARD FEELINGS (2023) ***

Strapped for cash, Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) answers an odd online ad placed by a wealthy couple to “date” their awkward virginal teenage son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) in exchange for a car.  When Maddie sets out to seduce him, she is surprised that Percy actually wants to get to know her first before they seal the deal. 

I’ve long admired Lawrence for her fearlessness.  Her performance in mother! is among my all-time favorites.  In No Hard Feelings, she gives us one of the most memorable nude scenes in recent history.  Things begin innocently enough with her and her young suitor skinny-dipping when some drunk teens decide to steal their clothes.  Up until now, we have only seen her bare back and shoulders.  However, when the kids begin to run off with their clothes, she comes storming off the beach full frontal and proceeds to kick their ass.  It’s not only one of the best nude scenes in the past few years, it’s also one of the best fight sequences. 

Like the best raunchy comedies, there are genuine character moments here that help endear our heroine to the audience.  She just wants to save her house.  Since she is a local in a resort town, the rich assholes who summer there are driving up the property taxes, which is relatable to me as someone who lives in a summer town year-round.  That sentiment is a nice reworking of the traditional slobs vs. snobs mentality of many ‘80s comedies. 

The fact that you have a woman in her thirties hanging out with a teenager also opens up some funny generation gap comedy.  One of the many highlights is when Lawrence crashes a high school party and the parents of the teen try to kick her out.  (“Do you think my son would have a party without our consent?”)  While the film follows the well-worn path of these kinds of sex comedies (it becomes more predictable in the third act once the kid eventually catches on that his parents put her up to it), it offers plenty of laughs along the way. 

Lawrence’s performance also helps to make it memorable.  Even if she didn’t have a nude fight scene, it would be still worth watching just for the scenes of her trying to pick up the hopelessly clueless kid.  Feldman is quite good too and the chemistry between the pair is genuine.  Because of that, No Hard Feelings is hard to resist.

THE LAST SHOWGIRL (2024) ***

The Last Showgirl is sort of like a blend of The Wrestler and Showgirls.  Pamela Anderson stars as an aging Vegas showgirl who receives word that the show she’s been a part of for so many years is coming to a close.  She uses the occasion to try to reconnect with her estranged daughter (Billie Lourd) and must eventually come to grips with her not-so promising future. 

Director Gia (Palo Alto) Coppola aims to give the audience an intimate portrait of an older woman at a turning point in her life.  She favors handheld camerawork and uses a lot of over-the-shoulder shots that lend the film a documentary feel.  The frank and claustrophobic backstage scenes also help take any kind of glamour you may associate with the occupation out of the equation. 

With her foul mouth and weathered, sun-damaged skin, Jamie Lee Curtis is a hoot as Anderson’s haggard looking best friend.  Even though Anderson got tons of glowing notices for her work here (and rightfully so), Curtis threatens to steal the movie out from under her at nearly every turn.  The hilarious/pathetic highlight is when she gets up in the middle of the casino and does an impromptu dance to “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.  She also gets some great lines like, “I’m not irresponsible.  I’m thinking about opening up an IRA!”  Dave Bautista is also quite good as the soft-spoken gentle giant backstage manager of the show, as is Kiernan Shipka as a young dancer who sees Anderson as a maternal figure.  Lourd gives a fine performance as well as her actual daughter, and Jason Schwartzman is great in a cameo as a sleazy director. 

Anderson is the heart of the movie.  This is easily her best performance, and proof she could be entering a new stage of her career.  It’s always nice to see someone the industry has more or less written off making a comeback like this and she deserves any accolades she gets. 

The movie itself is a little thin in spots.  Since it’s more of a slice of life kind of thing, it’s fairly easy to overlook.  It’s slight, but well-observed.  However, the performances are so good that it holds everything together. 

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB (2018) ** ½

While David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a hit, it didn’t exactly live up to its lofty box office expectations.  Instead of letting Fincher cook and finish out the Steig Larsson Millennium trilogy, Sony decided to bring in Fede Alvarez and reboot the franchise from scratch.  (Fincher retains an Executive Producer credit, although something tells me it might’ve been one of those contractual deals.)  That might’ve sounded like a good idea at the time, seeing how Alvarez cannily rebooted The Evil Dead series, but this was a massive flop. 

The Crown’s Claire Foy takes over the role of Lisbeth Salander, who is now running around and blackmailing rich assholes who cheat and beat on their wives.  She gets paid to steal a computer program that can hack into nations’ defense systems and when some shadowy agents steal it from her, she sets out to steal it back.  Turns out the gang (called “The Spiders”) is ran by none other than her estranged sister (Sylvia Hoeks) who has a score to settle with Lisbeth. 

Foy is even more waifish than Rooney Mara was when she played Lisbeth and lacks the pizzazz Noomi Rapace brought to the role.  I also kind of missed Lisbeth’s typical punk rock look.  (Her close-cropped hair and leather outfit makes her look closer to Aeon Flux, which isn’t really a complaint, just an observation.)  That said, Foy still equips herself reasonably well, especially while getting into chase scenes on her motorcycle. Likewise, Sverrir Gudnason, who plays the new Mikael Blomkvist, isn’t a patch on Daniel Craig or Michael Nyqvist, but he isn’t too shabby, all things considered. 

To his credit, Alvarez gives the film a sense of style that honors Fincher but still manages to have its own voice.  It’s more action-oriented than the previous incarnations of the series, which is fine, but it is missing the goth detective vibe that made them so memorable.  It’s consistently watchable and moderately entertaining, although it's not exactly involving.  While it certainly has its moments (there’s a gnarly scene where a dude removes his prosthetic nose), you do have a sinking suspicion this was all a product of wringing blood from stone. 

TWISTED SEX VOL. 1 (1994) ****

Something Weird delivered a home run with this eye-popping bonanza of sexploitation trailers.  It contains more sleaze and depravity than you can shake a stick at.  Among the subgenres included are women in prison (Stefania), cheesecake model movies (Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas), nudie cuties (The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee), roughies (The Hookers), nudist camp pictures (Girls Come Too), classy softcore fare (The Libertine), and Italian giallo thrillers (Bad Girls). 

Some of these titles may be familiar to you if you’re a fan of Something Weird releases (like Satan’s Bed starring none other than a pre-John Lennon Yoko Ono as “The virgin bride from the Orient!”), but there are a staggering number of movies here I have never heard of.  Trust me when I say I added a good dozen or so films to my watchlist after seeing them advertised here.  Twisted Sex Vol. 1 also gives us a tantalizing glimpse at a handful of lost movies.  The awesome looking MME Olga’s Massage Parlor (part of the Olga series) and the sexploitation flick A Weekend with Strangers (which is notable for being the film debut of Re-Animator’s David Gale) may be lost to time, but at least a few minutes of those films live on here in trailer form. 

Another highlight is Censored, a Barry Mahon flick that purports to show uncensored scenes that were too steamy for the general public, but it was in actuality a clever marketing gimmick.  Another Mahon production is the early transgender flick I was a Man that looks to be the missing link between Glen or Glenda and Let Me Die a Woman.  There’s also a trailer for a low budget skin flick called The King which features a potentially amazing scene where a woman has lesbian sex while wearing a Bela Lugosi mask.  The preview for Watch the Birdie is backed to the swinging sounds of “The Bird is the Word” by Rocky Roberts and the Airedales (which was also featured in the immortal the Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield) and contains an incredible looking death by toilet scene. 

There are also plenty of great taglines along the way.  Among my favorites were My Body Hungers (“See a sexual assault of a young girl in its entirety!”), Vapors (“Filmed by the new leader in underground filmmaking, Andy Milligan!”), and All Woman (“A bold look at Freudian realism!”).  All in all, this is one of Something Weird’s best trailer compilations, which is really saying something. 

The complete trailer rundown is as follows: The Immoral, Stefania, Strange Compulsion, The Weird Lovemakers, a double feature of Pussycats Paradise and A Trip Around the World, Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas, A Story of Eight Girls, The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, Forbidden Beauties, Nudes on the Rocks (AKA:  50,000 B.C. Before Clothing), Satan’s Bed, MME Olga’s Massage Parlor, Censored, A Good Time with a Bad Girl, My Body Hungers, The Hookers, Vapors, I was a Man, The Tomcat, All Woman, Submission, The Warm, Warm Bed, Ride the Wild Pink Horse, The King, Watch the Birdie, My Third Wife George, Girls Come Too, The Orgy of the Golden Nudes (AKA:  Honeymoon of Horror), Sextet, Tassle-a-Go-Go, Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley, The Libertine, Camille 2000, Fanny Hill Meets the Red Baron, I a Woman Part 2, Fuego, The Brutes, A Weekend with Strangers, Bad Girls, The Girl Grabbers, Women for Sale, The Rape Killer, and Girl in Room 2A. 

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH (2025) **

Jurassic World:  Rebirth is a tired and uninspired remix of Universal’s durable dinosaur franchise.  It’s the seventh entry in the series, and the cliches are beginning to feel as old as the dinosaurs themselves.  Even the original screenwriter David Koepp was unable to breathe life into this one.  (Incredibly enough, this is the third turd Koepp has written this year after the forgettable Presence and the weak Black Bag.)

This time, a greedy Big Pharma jackass (Rupert Friend) hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and her team to go to one of the Jurassic Park testing islands and retrieve blood samples from some dinosaurs that he can use to wipe out heart disease or some shit.  This set-up feels more like cut scenes from a video game.  In the first level, they have to find a dinosaur in the sea.  The second level, they need a dinosaur from the land.  And in the third, they have to contend with dinosaurs in the air. 

Adding to the movie’s woes is the subplot about a family who becomes shipwrecked on the island.  The crosscutting back and forth between Scar Jo and her team with the family in peril causes the film to lose much of its momentum.  I think either of these plots could have worked on their own.  (Think Swiss Family Robinson, but with dinosaurs.)  Having both just bogs things down. 

One of the biggest disappointments is the dinosaurs themselves.  About halfway through the movie, someone mentions that the island is supposedly inhabited by mutant dinosaurs, but they mostly look like the same shit we’ve seen in the other movies.  The “big bad” dino just looks like he’s got a big scrotum on his forehead.  He only shows up for the last reel though and is kind of underwhelming. 

Not only does the movie recycle elements and scenarios from the previous Jurassic Park movies, it rips off other Steven Spielberg films like Jaws (the whole mosasaurus sequence), E.T. (a little girl feeds a creature candy), and the Spielberg-produced Gremlins (said girl carries a baby dinosaur around in her backpack).  It’s also a shame that the film conveniently writes off the lone intriguing element from the Jurassic World series (the humans being forced to share the planet with the dinosaurs) by having most of the dinosaurs dying off or fleeing to the equator.  Because of that, the film feels more like a reboot than a continuation.  Put another way, Rebirth is more like an afterbirth. 

TEENAGE BIKERS (1977) ***

Teenage Bikers begins with a scene of people riding motorcycles set to the tune of “Born to Be Wild”.  (Easy Rider eat your heart out!).  Then the plot begins.  And by “plot”, I mean ‘70s porn stars wearing denim vests fuck while surrounded by biker paraphernalia. 

First, we see everyone’s favorite hardcore lunatic Jamie Gillis banging a biker mama in a public restroom.  Then, Vanessa del Rio gets so hot and horny that she begs a biker to fuck her in the ass.  Meanwhile, Bobby Astyr is getting busy bumping uglies with his old lady. 

These scenes might’ve worked better had the filmmakers allowed them to play out from start to finish as three separate sequences.  Instead, they cut back and forth between the three couplings, which kind of lessens the impact.  Then again, the fact that Gillis’ scene culminates with him receiving a golden shower and del Rio’s begins with her pulling a chain out of her pussy (And I don’t mean like a slim necklace or something.  I’m talking about some heavy-duty Jacob Marley-type shit.), they are, at the very least, memorable.

While Aster’s scene is far less noteworthy, the next sequence where he bangs del Rio and his girlfriend on the back of his hog is good for a hearty laugh or two.  That’s mostly because it’s set to the tune of the theme from Shaft.  At first, you may think it’s weird to steal this particular needle drop as Astyr is not a black private dick (although he is a sex machine to at least a few of the chicks).  It’s not until you realize that a majority of the scene focuses on Astyr’s shaft being sucked, that it begins to make some kind of sense. 

There’s also a great bit where a biker babe dreams about looking at a poster of Peter Fonda from Easy Rider when Gillis and another guy crash their motorcycle through the wall and proceed to double team her. 

One complaint I had is that it ends with the bikers going to an orgy that is never shown.  Oh, and no one in the cast looks remotely close to being a teenager.  Maybe that’s why the alternate title, Sex Bikers is more prevalent.  These problems are minor in the long run though.  If sex and motorcycles are your thing, then Teenage Bikers will likely rev your engine. 

AKA:  Sex Bikers.  AKA:  Young Bikers.

SEX-O-PHRENIA (1970) ***

Rene Bond stars as a lonely housewife who is suffering from cripplingly powerful sexual fantasies.  Whenever she just thinks about sex, she has to strip down and pleasure herself.  After her husband spurns her sexual advances, she goes out and picks up a wino from the gutter and brings him back to their garage to bang.  When he fails to satisfy her, Rene uses his wine bottle to get off!  Later, she seduces her next-door neighbor on the kitchen floor, but much to his chagrin, his wife catches them in the act.  Bond then further spirals headlong into a sexual frenzy with little hope of finding a cure. 

Sex-O-Phrenia is a surprisingly fun skin flick that is packed with amusing moments.  Things kick off with a funny opening when a doctor miraculously appears in Bond’s living room and addresses the audience about her titular condition.  There’s also an odd scene where the camera keeps cutting away from Bond making love to two dead roaches. 

Bond gives an excellent performance in this.  She’s equally good during her dramatic scenes where she is trying to get her disinterested husband to notice her as she is in her sex scenes.  Speaking of which, there’s a hot scene where Bond uses a vibrator while having a sexual fantasy.  I also thought it was a nice touch that whenever she is in the grips of her sexual compulsion, she is shown wearing Raggedy Ann-inspired make-up.  Fans of Bond will definitely want to give this a look as she is practically the whole show. 

It looks like it was at one time a hardcore porno, but some sneaky bastard took a pair of scissors to it and cut it all up.  (Well, there are some fleeting glimpses of near-hardcore footage.)  The relatively scant fifty-seven-minute running time kind of supports that theory.  It’s not any kind of forgotten classic by any means, but it is nice that the filmmakers attempted to at least broach the psychological aspects of sexual desire instead of just indifferently churning out another dirty movie. 

AKA:  Sexophrenia.