Contracted

I think I just got tricked into watching a zombie movie, guys. Netflix can convince me to watch a lot of strange things, and I really do like strange, but this was akin to discovering a bag of garbage that's been sitting hidden in your shed for a year. What's this? Old Christmas ornaments? Clothes for donation? No. Just a sack full of moist, gnarly detritus and something wiggling a little.

Samantha (Najarra Townsend) is a strangely beautiful girl who is embarrassingly obsessed with her ex-girlfriend Nikki (Katie Stegeman) - an ostensibly English girl - who behaves toward Sam as though she's continually just turned up at her door, trying to offer her an issue of The Watchtower. Nikki's attitude toward her ranges from a bored obligation to converse to thinly-veiled bored hostility.

The story begins with Sam attending a house party of her friend Alice (Alice Macdonald) with absolutely no desire to socialize or drink, and practically walking around announcing to anyone who will listen that she's a lesbian, duh. Naturally, she gets intensely hammered and has sexual intercourse in a car with a man named BJ (Simon Barrett) whom I can only describe as extremely blurry.

Take that, nice guy Riley (Matt Mercer), how dare you try to act like a normal, decent dude with no intentions of slipping a roofie to the object of your affection.

As you can deduce from the poster, Sam begins to get very ill, over the course of three short days. This is where the film goes from dopey to inexplicable. It's not just the fact that her outward severity of symptoms change drastically back and forth between scenes (one moment her left eye is salmon colored, the next completely opaque white, then back again) it's also how mildly everyone is reacting to a person who looks like she's in the early stages of late-stage leprosy. More than half the time, they don't even seem to notice the funk emanating from her like sickness stink lines in a cartoon.

She's also acting very suspiciously. Just walking around being the most conspicuously suspicious character in the vicinity. Plus, I can't imagine a doctor would be presented with a previously healthy, young woman who is suddenly bleeding like a stuck pig, has a severe rash starting in her genitals which branches upward, and an extremely low heart-rate and not send her to the emergency room. I don't even think this "doctor" Googled her symptoms. My quick search indicates that best-case scenario, noticeable bradycardia can mean she's really damned dehydrated. Instead of telling her to drink some Gatorade, he merely suggests that she lotion up her vagina, because ew, there's a lot of dry, dead skin on it.

During her second visit, when the iris of her right eye has turned completely red and the left has gone pink, he's all, "Well, it looks bad, but what can we do? Just gotta wait for the test results. Definitely looks like an infection, but I have to find out exactly which one before I can give you some antibiotics. I'll have my nurse call you after the labs are back. Oh, and you're probably really contagious, so try to just ... stay away from other people while you wait."

She's a waitress, and he doesn't even advise her not to go into work with her crazy, sometimes bleeding eyeballs and touch people's salad greens with her bare, blood-caked fingernails. Her own boss (E-Kan Soong) sees this shit and is like, "Oh man, that looks pretty terrible. I'll call someone to cover your shift, you just wait here in the completely un-staffed, gleaming kitchen near all the stuff we don't want contaminated by anything that oozes."

Even after Sam hears from Alice that the police are looking for a mysterious guy from the party, she still doesn't care that her teeth, hair and nails are falling off her body - what's most important is keeping Nikki from hearing that she's had sex with a dude.

Sam's own mother (Caroline Williams) appears to be more concerned with the weak subplot of her daughter being a recovering heroin addict. Aren't you looking right at her, mom?! She's vomiting blood all over your clean bathroom!

The grossness persists and escalates. She tries to kiss three people (two of whom let her) with a sore at the corner of her mouth, grey, rotting teeth, and what has to be some galloping morning death breath. I might be a little fussy, but I don't want to touch mouths with someone who has spinach stuck in their teeth, even if they do have a cute, interesting nose.

There's no reason to watch this film. It's ridiculous, yet even with the "here's my motivation, see?" acting and unrealistic, "man, you look like shit, are you feeling well?" reactions to physical decay, it's still not over-the-top enough to truly be a work of unintentional art. Your time might be better spent writing haikus about your lover's burrito farts, or digging that gunk from under your fingernails.

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Gentlemen Broncos

"Together, we will learn to love, you gorgeous hag, you ... freak machine."

Let's get started. It's Gentlemen Broncos, and you have my best friend Bunny Walker to thank for my knowledge of this film.

This story begins with a boy - a writer named Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano) - who lives with his home-schooling mother Judith (Jennifer Coolidge) in a geodesic dome that's stuffed to the vertices with intense levels of quirk.

First order of business is Cletus Fest - a fantasy writer's convention that I would attend just for the possibility of getting a little mussed up by some second-hand unself-conscious and earnest absurdity.

On the way there, Benjamin meets Tabatha (Halley Feiffer), a sexual deviant with a penchant for ill-begotten snacks and the raw sexuality of someone trying not to shit their pants while watching someone else shit their pants.

Don't fall in love, boys, she'll only crush your soul.

Also along for the ride is Tabatha's side-kick Lonnie Donaho (Héctor Jiménez) an amateur film maker who never does anything without every one of his teeth involved and sports a permanent demeanor of one experiencing some sort of pleasurable agony.
 

Ill-begotten snack breath.

Needless to say, this was not your mother's bus ride to a festival.

Or maybe it was. I don't judge.

Speaking at the convention is the object of so many fantasy nerd's admiration and/or dirty daydreams, Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement). He has the sort of silky, sensuous and so serious deep voice that only a man who continually wears a Bluetooth, but never ever uses, can rock with a steadiness that makes my thighs very weak. My calves are doing great, though, so no biggie.

He will go with Traginus. Every time.

Chevalier is judging a writing contest, and (ceremoniously, actually) decides to plagiarize Benjamin's novella Yeast Lords. What's the story about, you ask? Yeast, mostly. *nods*

Bronco (Sam Rockwell) is the last of the yeast lords - the enemy has purloined all of his yeast and borrowed one of his gonads for military-strengthening research ...

You know what, I don't want to ruin the whole thing for you.

Chevalier decides to make a few changes to the original story - most notably re-naming Bronco and turning him into the gayest version of Edgar Winter allowed by god's law, before publishing it under a new name, Brutus and Balzaak.

Balzaak. I get it.

In the meantime, Lonnie Donaho is shooting his version of Yeast Lords for the big screen. You know, the one on 4th or whatever - thus turning this movie into three yeast cake-filled movies within a movie.

If all these versions leave you stressed out enough to give birth to a litter of troll cubs, just grab
someone you care about and blow on some friendship stones. It'll soothe your nerves.

This is one of those films you're either going to love or loathe. I've seen it three times now, and have decided that's probably enough, unless someone sends me some special cookies to eat for a fourth viewing. *clears throat*

The ending is slightly predictable, in that some people fly off toward the horizon on battle stags.

It's a happy conclusion.

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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.