The Immaculate Conception Of Little Dizzle

I make a lot of foolish choices in movie viewing. This is due partially to insomnia clouding my good judgment, and partially Netflix suggesting things with what seems to be a sinister algorithm, bent on tormenting the easily swayed.

This title sat on my list for a few weeks, until finally, I gave in to it. "What could a Little Dizzle possibly be?" I mused.

*sigh*

The story begins with a young man, Dory (Marshall Altman) sitting on some craggy rocks at the edge of the water, reaching for a message in a bottle. He falls in, retrieves the bottle, then cuts himself smashing it open. The message reads "Fuck You."

Nice. That'll give anyone a scorching case of the Mondays.

Next we find Dory sitting at his desk trying to computer program, yet being actively and violently annoyed out of his precious sanity by some chick at an adjacent desk, yapping on her cellphone about shit so irritating, my brain refuses to even recall what the topic was.

Dory goes freaky nuts, screams at her and smashes her cellphone. Yes, Dory, yes. I am on board. Take me on a hay ride of justice with you.

Naturally, the faceless company is forced to let him go, and Dory is forced to take a job as a night janitor in a large office complex with a bunch of crazy people. The leader of the cleaning crew is O.C. (Vince Vieluf). He's fun I guess. Among the crew are also someone called Weird William (Richard Lefebvre) and an oversexed couple named Ethyl (Tania Raymonde) and Methyl (Tygh Runyan).

One of the offices they clean is a marketing research firm currently testing a new formulation for a cookie that gives the effect of being fresh-from-the-oven warm. Tracy (Natasha Lyonne) suggests to the Cookie Company CEO (Lance Rosen) that they surreptitiously test out the cookie on the night janitors, by leaving tons of the cookies in the trash. Now that I type this, it seems like a completely foolproof plan.

The men on the janitorial staff who've been eating the cookies start experiencing intestinal distress, salt cravings and vivid hallucinations. Methyl has some even more psychotic than usual episodes. They keep eating them, I assume, because their mothers never baked them enough cookies when they were kids. Or they're addicted. I'm no doctor.

Meanwhile, as Dory is cleaning the toilets, he finds something strange, bright blue, and possibly moving. As anyone would do in this situation, he calls everyone over to look at it, at which point everyone delivers their best poop jokes, before flushing it down and getting on with custodial work and cookie eating.

It's at this point I find myself unable to cleverly or delicately explain what the baked treats are doing to these men, so I'll just spit it out. The cookies are making them give birth to blue fish from their asses. The fish have no mouths or noses, so they die soon after birth. I feel it bears repeating that fish are wriggling out of men's asses in this film.

I know, I know.

The end of this thrill ride will make you want to click the remote to almost anything else available and attempt to get on with your life without trying to explain what you just saw. I have failed myself and you. My apologies. Rest in peace, Little Assfish.

The Hole

I don't quite understand why I watched The Hole. Netflix had it listed in the "witty movie" section and I'd forgotten for a moment how they lie. Also, not unlike this movie, I too have a mysterious hole that leads to nowhere which is full of unspeakable misery. But I didn't build it. Nobody built the hole.

Alright, let's get this over with. Single mom Susan (Teri Polo - she's that chick from that thing you saw) moves her two sons Dane (Chris Massoglia) and Lucas (Nathan Gamble) into an adorable rental house in a nice neighborhood because they are obviously running away from something we couldn't possibly figure out until they spelled it out like we're five and hard of understanding.

Almost immediately, the boys find a trap door in the basement, kept closed with several padlocks - and no sooner than you can bellow, "Someone give me a fricking Nutella sandwich!" mom finds a new boyfriend. She also seems more surprised than I was that her kids didn't immediately start knitting him Father's Day ties.

Did I mention the teenage girl next door? Her name's Julie (Haley Bennett) and her parents do not appear to exist. She is nearly an expert on what's cool - and according to her, what's cool is a gateway to hell under your house. And how! She does have one of the "wittiest" lines in the movie, which was something like, "stop looking at that and play, or go home and jump in your hole." Jump in your own hole, lady.

Anyway, the boys decide to explore the hole by throwing things into it. You know, stuff like rusty nails and a talking Cartman doll - the usual stuff people toss into pits. As you'd expect, this not only angers the hole monster, but also allows it to escape, since padlocks can hold the hole closed, but a freezer big enough to fit three or four dead bodies (depending) cannot.

I'm sure right now, you're as ready to hurl yourself into the hole as I was by the time single mom Susan leaves her sons alone for a couple of days with a wooden gaping maw in the basement for some sort of "hospital business trip". This is where things get predictable, except for the bow-legged clown. Nobody expects that.

Yadda, blah, ugh - the moral of this story is that you have only to shake a bony finger at your greatest fears and they will disappear back down into the nothingness that once spewed fresh heck right at your stupid face. Creepy Carl (Bruce Dern) didn't get that memo in time, unfortunately.

In summation, not enough people are dead at the end of this movie. On a scale of "I wanna refund!" to "passionate ovation", I'm going to have to give this movie a solid "murnph".
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