Year:  2012
Genre:  TV series, ”Reality“, Garbage
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  The worst people in the world
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     There is a limited shelf life for Jersey Shore, at least with the current cast of sexers and flexers and douchebags and dingbats. After all, they will eventually reach an age where they might realize that dirty, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

     That’s why, despite having been on TV for only two and a half years, they have already gone through FIVE TV seasons, and even have a spin-off show for Snooki and J-Wow. In Season Five, (on DVD August 28^th from Paramount Home Entertainment), the gang is back from Italy and once again working at the T-shirt store.

     The thing is, I have the whole DVD set. So why start every episode with “previously, on Jersey Shore…”? I have the whole season. I know what happened “previously, on Jersey Shore.” I know that the Situation was a whiny assbag, and that Deena was a desperate, sad stupid troll and that Pauly D was an obnoxious narcisist and that Vinny slept with lesbians and that Snooki got drunk and fell over. Skip skip skip.

     Speaking of Snooki getting drunk and falling over, that is, of course, all she has ever done on this show. Except in season five, when she keeps peeing uncontrollably for some reason, and goes to the doctor. No one ever explains WHY she’s having these medical issues, and she chalks it up to a urinary tract infection. Or, because she’s too cool for real words, a UTI.

     Strange then, to see that she just gave birth. On Sunday. To a child. Now, I’m not cynical enough to believe that MTV kept the news of her pregnancy a secret so she could continue to get hammered and fall down with impunity. But I AM just cynical enough to believe they timed the release of Season Five of Jersey Shore for the week that Snooki gave birth and got into the news again. Now that I can believe.

Years:  2011, 2012
Genre:  TV series, Crime, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English, French
Starring:  Mark Harmon, Michael Weatherly, Pauley Perrette, Sean Murray, David McCallum, Brian Dietzen, Cote De Pablo, Rocky Carroll, Jamie Lee Curtis
Creator:  Donald P. Bellisario, Don McGill
Run time:  16 hours, 49 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     I don’t mind when NCIS does the two or three part episodes. It’s a great show, and I can handle waiting for the next episode to find out what happens. But the way they closed out Season 9, with three parts of what could end up being a six part episode with a very annoying cliff hanger, is a lot too much.

     On August 21^st Paramount Home Entertainment releases Season 9 of NCIS on DVD, and I have now watched it all.  I really liked the first four discs, because they’re pretty much what I’ve come to expect from NCIS – a solid procedural crime show with a good cast. Yeah, there are some cop-out episodes where they get rid of Ziva’s boyfriend so they can keep playing on the sexual tension between her and Tony, but it’s a small complaint.

     My big complaint – and I do have a big complaint – is with the last two discs. Partly because of the annoying cliffhanger episodes, but mostly because of the introduction of Jamie Lee Curtis to the show. I like Jamie Lee Curtis, but her role is so badly written that it’s painful. She’s a super-agent in the psychological warfare division of…something…called psy-ops. And she’s all about the mind games, you see. So she’s sneaky and mysterious and devious and manipulative.

     Ostensibly, she has been introduced as a foil/romantic love interest for Mark Harmon’s Gibbs, as she’s supposed to be his intellectual and badass equal. But she doesn’t seem that way to me. To me, she just comes across as one of those incredibly irritating women who thinks she’s way smarter and way sexier than she actually is, and just ends up being creepy. And Jamie Lee Curtis, in Season Nine of NCIS, creeps me out. And it’s not (just) because she now looks exactly like my mom.

Years:  2011, 2012
Genre:  TV series, Crime, Drama
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  LL Cool J, Chris O’Donnell, Linda Hunt, Peter Cambor, Daniela Ruah, Adam Jamal Craig, Barrett Foa, Claire Forlani
Creator:  Shane Brennan
Run time:  17 hours, 25 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment
Related reviews:  NCIS Season Seven, NCIS Season Eight, NCIS: LA Season One, NCIS: LA Season Two

     Even more so than NCIS, NCIS: LA is brainless fun. It’s loud, and flashy, and all buddy-coppy and generally generic. But muscular LL Cool J, brooding Chris O’Donnell, smoking hot Daniela Ruah and especially tiny little badass Linda Hunt make the otherwise run-of-the-mill subject matter truly entertaining.

     Season three of NCIS: LA comes to DVD August 21^st from Paramount Home Entertainment, and like Season nine of NCIS, it ends with an obnoxious cliffhanger that suggests Hetty is going to resign…again. At the end of every season, she’s either about to quit or about to be killed. I get it. But I also get that Hetty is the best part of the show, and it’s quite likely she’ll be back at the beginning of Season Four. Other than that, season three is as entertaining as usual, helped along by the addition of Claire Forlani for a number of episodes, giving us yet another pretty shiny thing to look at.

     NCIS: LA is like Lays potato chips. It’s tasty, has little substance, and you can’t watch just one episode. That’s why it is best watched on DVD, rather than on TV. When I watch an episode on TV, I forget it exists by the time the next week rolls around. On DVD, I can watch the entire season in a weekend and enjoy every minute.

Year:  2012
Genre:  Drama, Comedy
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Armie Hammer, Lily Collins, Julia Roberts, Nathan Lane, Jordan Prentice, Mare Winningham, Sean Bean
Director:  Tarsem Singh
Run time:  106 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Mirror Mirror is a movie that’s all about beauty.  It is gorgeous film making, every scene wonderfully crafted and shiny and lovely and breathtaking.  Julia Roberts is stunningly beautiful as the evil queen, and young star Lily Collins has a sort of Audrey Hepburn hotness as Snow White.

     The problem with Mirror Mirror is that it is all about the sort of beauty you see in…well, a mirror.  The two-dimensional kind of beauty.  There is zero depth in this Snow White adaptation, and it’s as disappointing as it is lovely.  Oh, it hits all the bases – there are seven dwarves and there is a prince and the queen is evil and talks to a mirror and wields horrible magic and the townspeople suffer and so forth. 

     But really it’s just going through the motions, and there is no sense of wonder or foreboding or mystery or…substance.  At times it feels like the movie is trying to be a parody, with twinkling teeth and lines about focus groups.  But again, it’s just going through those motions as well.

     Another problem with Mirror Mirror is that Julia Roberts IS the hottest woman in the world. Still. And even doing a great Audrey Hepburn impression, Lily Collins is still not quite the fairest of them all. I realize, of course, that this is subjective, and it’s my own lust for Julia Roberts colouring my judgement. I just find it hard to let go of Julia Roberts, who has been the star of my prostitute fantasy since 1990.  But ultimately, whether you agree with that assessment or not, the movie is less Julia Roberts and more Kim Kardashian. Lovely to look at, but you’re REALLY a lot better off not paying attention to it.  Mirror Mirror comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray June 26^th from Alliance Films.

Year:  2011, 2012
Genre:  Comedy, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Matt LeBlanc, Stephen Mangan, Tamsin Greig, John Pankow, Mircea Monroe, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Richard Griffiths
Creators:  David Crane (Friends), Jeffrey Klarik (Mad About You)
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     Episodes is a smart show from smart writers about smart people who once wrote a smart show and now have to write a dumb show for dumb people.  It stars Matt LeBlanc as himself, the guy who used to play Joey on Friends, trying to get away from his Joey character while playing a character who is almost exactly like Joey.

     Got that?  Alright, here’s a more concise version – Episodes is good.  It’s smart.  And Matt LeBlanc, playing himself, is very good at spoofing his own image while the show spoofs the whole television industry.  Season One of Episodes hits DVD June 12^th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it’s well worth checking out if you haven’t yet seen it on Showtime. 

     A couple of British writers are recruited by a maniac TV executive to bring their successful show Lyman’s Boys over to America. Once in the States, the network makes change after change, turning a smart and successful British show starring the great Richard Griffiths into a stupid, painful pile of garbage starring Matt LeBlanc.

     Over the course of the first season Sean and Beverly, the British writers, have to come to grips with life in LA, they have to deal with stupid producers and stupider Matt LeBlanc, and their relationship comes unraveled as their show goes down the tubes. At the end of the season it appears the show will get dropped by the network because it’s terrible. But this is TV and that doesn’t seem to matter, because like 2 Broke Girls and Whitney, it gets picked up.

     Of course, that happens so that we’ll get a second season of Episodes. Which remains a very good, very funny show. So, by all logic, that means it should be canceled pretty soon. And if that happened, I don’t know if it would be disappointing, ironic, or absolutely perfect.

Year:  2011, 2012
Genre:  Comedy, TV series
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, Kyle Newacheck, Maribeth Monroe, Jillian Bell, Edward Barbanell, and guest appearances by Clint Howard and Nicky Whelan
Creators:  Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, Kyle Newacheck
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     A couple of Workaholics releases June 5^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  The second season comes out on DVD, and also a Blu-Ray combo package of Seasons One and Two.  The second season of the Comedy Central show is as good as the first, and had me busting a gut over and over.  And I was totally sober when I watched it!

     The second season starts out with a stolen dragon statue, the subsequent RE-stealing of that same dragon statue, and a very funny undercover operation at the local high school.  Then they try to go sober, moon over a new smoking hot co-worker, Anders goes through a midlife crisis at the age of 25, and the guys hide out in sewers like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  It sounds pretty formulaic and easy when I say it like that, but I can’t convey the insanity or stupidity or sheer fun of watching Workaholics, even without a giant bong in the middle of the room.

     Of course, people who know the show likely have season one already.  And you’ll just go out and buy season two whether I recommend it or not because you know it’s great.  For the rest of you, get the combo package.  Season one and two together.  It’s like getting the munchies with a giant bag of popcorn in front of you.  I bet you watch the whole thing in a day.

Year:  2012
Genre:  Horror, Parody
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Danielle Panabaker, David Koechner, Katrina Bowden, Matt Bush, Chris Zylka, David Hasselhoff, Ving Rhames, Paul Scheer
Cameos:  Gary Busey, Christopher Lloyd
Eye candy:  Here’s a pretty good list
Director:  John Gulager
Run time:  82 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     I went into Piranha 3DD with fairly high hopes and expectations.  The first movie was such a bonkers good time, such enthusiastic pandemonium!  The best thing about the Piranha 3D was that it had an utter disregard for normal movie pacing.  The scene where the two impossible hot naked women frolic with each other underwater went on forever before the piranhas showed up!  The finale seemed like a full forty minutes of Piranhas eating drunk spring breakers.  It was a hell of a lot of fun.

     So I was figuring that, even with a little bit of a letdown, the second movie had to at least be gleefully enjoyable to some degree.  It turns out I was wrong.  Sadly, painfully wrong.  The biggest problem with the new Piranha is that the film makers don’t seem like they’re having ANY fun making this film.  They have the bases they have to hit, they hit them, then they go home.  It reminds me of all those made-for-TV sequels to surprisingly successful monster movies where some director whose biggest credit to date is a Jim “the Hammer” Shapiro commercial goes through the motions and comes up with a paint-by-numbers crap job. It’s probably no coincidence that David Hasselhoff mentions Anaconda 3 in this movie.  Both movies are working on the same level.

     Piranha 3DD opens with another bizarre cameo, just like the first one – only this time instead of Richard Dreyfuss, it’s Gary Busey.  And instead of being a (vaguely) subtle homage to aquatic monster movies of the past, this one involves an exploding cow and a very cheesy decapitation. 

     Okay.  So they got the cameo-setup scene out of the way.  What’s next?  Oh right, gratuitous naked chicks and boobs.  So we cut to that, as Chet (David Koechner) unveils his new water park, where strippers and prostitutes are hired as lifeguards and there is an adults-only section for naked swimming and close-up underwater shots of all the girly parts.  We get a few minutes full of boobs and a fair amount of gratuitous full-frontal, and despite the moderately-inspired positioning of one particular camera, there is absolutely nothing titillating about the nudity.  It’s just boobs and vaginas.  Then it’s done.

     Sidebar – this may be the worst business idea of all time.  Strippers earn about $1,000 a night just to take their clothes off and gyrate. Now you’re taking lifeguard-certified strippers, and getting them to work eight-hour days?  Even assuming they are still working for only $1,000 a day, this guy has hired what appears to be at least 25 of them.  That’s $25,000 a DAY in salary, not including the guy who cleans stuff up with a trident and the other employee who is there just to be fat or the guy at the bar or all the others.  The price list is posted, and at an average of $15 a head, they would need about 1,700 paying customers a day just to break even.  Not that I’m looking for realism in Piranha 3DD, or even vague plausibility, but couldn’t they have found a slightly better premise to get nudity shoehorned into this thing?

     Now they’ve done the cameo and the boobs…what’s next?  Oh yeah – we have to have a main character, a love interest and a bad guy.  Within a few minutes they have established  Maddy (Danielle Pannabaker) as the star of the movie, Barry (Matt Bush) as the guy who has pined after her since the 7^th grade, and some villains in her on-again-off-again boyfriend Kyle (Chris Zylka) and her step-father Chet. Okay, done.

     Cameo, nudity, love interest, bad guy…check, check, check, check. Paint by numbers #5 – the dire warning from the crazy man about the piranhas! Christopher Lloyd is actually pretty great as the crazy scientist, but his screen time is limited to a warning, a demonstration with a live piranha in a tank in his office, and some brief foreshadowing that fish might one day evolve to the point that they can – gasp! – walk on land!  Then his time is done.  He has another brief but disappointing scene later on, when the one thing we expect does not take place.

     Paint by number #6 – carnage.  Again, this is a HUGE letdown after that massacre scene in the last movie.  See, this one is taking place at a water park.  Which means that when the piranhas attack, it’s in pools.  So…all people really have to do is get out of the water.  Which means the only way they can be eaten is if they just stand there like dummies amid the carnage.  And of course, some of them do – but most of the piranha violence is limited to people running on the deck covered in blood and body parts floating around in the pools.

     Paint by number #7 – body parts.  Let’s see…what worked in the last movie…oh yeah – the severed penis! Let’s just do that again.  (Actually, the severed penis scene in the first movie was the only scene I felt was more stupid than fun, and actually detracted from the film as a whole.) This time, it was done even more poorly and stupidly with no inspiration whatever.  I’ll leave it at that.

     Paint by number #8 – Ving Rhames does something badass.  In this case he shows up in a wheelchair.  Piranhas ate his legs in the first one, you see.  He actually gets the best line of the movie – when he says “bring me my legs”, and shotguns are attached to his stumps, Paul Scheer asks him how he got the guns, and he says “I bought them with the money I saved on socks”.  That’s pretty funny. But then his two minutes are up and he too goes away.

     David Hasselhoff shows up, in what could be considered a parody of himself, the actor, and his failing career.  Or, a parody of his character on Baywatch.  In point of fact, it’s neither.  He’s given some terrible lines, his scenes are half-assed at best, and all he really does is wander around aimlessly in the movie, adding absolutely nothing to it.  Well, with the exception of the line “hello, rock bottom”.  Which probably sums up the movie better than anything I could say or write.

     Paint by number #9 – the finale. The bad guys have received their comeuppance (although it is very disappointing comeuppance, in that it does not come via piranha), the nerdy guy gets the girl, the destruction has stopped and the running boobs have stopped bouncing.  They need one last laugh/scare.  It might be the only really good one in the whole movie.  It just came an hour and twenty minutes too late. 

Final grade: DD-

Year:  2012
Genre:  Horror
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmuth, Ionut Grama, Suzan Crowley
Director:  William Brent Bell
Run time:  83 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Devil Inside is one of those handheld documentary style horror movies that seemed so new and fresh ten years ago when The Blair Witch Project led into Diary of the Dead and Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity and so forth.  It remains an effective style, because it can still create sudden creepiness and some decent scares.

     But to stand out, a movie needs to do something I haven’t seen before.  I am so familiar with this genre now that I can pretty much telegraph every coming scene long before it arrives on screen.  And so it is with The Devil Inside, which adds nothing new to an already overdone genre.  There are some good moments and some good camerawork, especially when the possessed people contort their bodies in all kinds of gruesome and humanly impossible ways.  There are also some solid acting performances, notably from the two guys who play the young priests performing exorcisms that are unsanctioned by their Vatican superiors.

     But every time the movie started to get interesting it reverted to the same old formula.  I thought for a moment that there would be a really interesting conversation about science and theology and the connection between the two when it came to exorcisms, but it ended as quickly as it began, and it was right back to the demons and the panic.  The Devil Inside is about as average as horror films get – it’s on DVD May 15^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Year:  2012
Genre:  Horror
Country:  United States
Language:   English
Starring:  Val Kilmer, Ving Rhames, Luke Goss
Director:  Kevin Carraway
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     Every now and then, someone asks me for a clarification of a B-movie versus…well, NOT a B-movie.  And I’ll say this.  It’s an inexact science.  Usually it means low production values and a movie made on a budget.  If the cop station in a movie looks like the copy room at your office, it’s a B movie.  Also, a B-movie spends very little on actors.  If there are a bunch of actors you’ve never heard of, or a bunch of porn stars, or Cuba Gooding Jr., it’s a B-movie.

     Then there’s Val Kilmer.  If HE’s in a movie, it’s a B-movie.  Because Val Kilmer will now work for food.  He’s been getting a lot of work lately, and you can tell because he’s clearly been eating a lot of food.  Or Ving Rhames, who seems to be an agreeable guy, one who will appear in your movie if he happens to be walking by the set that day.

     The latest movie to have Ving Rhames walking by the set, and to pay Val Kilmer in buckets of KFC, is called 7 Below.  It’s one of those silly horror movies where some mystical being controls people and makes them kill each other, and the real killer is revealed only at the last minute, then there’s a twist, and I’m just glad it’s over. 

     It comes to DVD April 17^th from Alliance Films.  It seems that they didn’t have quite enough of a budget to spring for the 20-piece family bucket, because Val Kilmer has very little screen time.

     The thing about these B horror movies is that it’s very rare that any of them are good.  That’s because just making the movie is the goal, and then distributing it for people who will buy any horror movie they see.  So an interesting premise, a good script and a solid cast are all irrelevant.  Instead they just slap a bunch of stuff together, get a quasi-big name for the price of a double down sandwich, throw it on video and move on to the next one.  The best you can hope for is adequacy.  And that’s how we get 7 Below.

     JB Smoove is a comedian who will be most recognizable to most people as Leon Black from the magnificent Curb Your Enthusiasm.  And if you’re familiar with Larry David’s incredibly funny TV show, and the character of Leon, you might believe that JB Smoove will be equally funny when performing stand-up comedy.

     If this is what you believe, you would be wrong.  Oh, there are a few funny moments in his new stand-up DVD, That’s How I Dooz It, out April 3^rd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I thought his bit about cops running with a bunch of stuff on their belts was very good.  But most of his act is physical humour that goes on way too long.  In the whole 60 minutes, there appear to be only seven actual jokes, each one beaten to death by an overly long physical demonstration of the joke itself.  There’s a chair on stage, but he never sits down, instead using the chair to represent his girlfriend when he describes their sexual intercourse.  He uses the mic cable to represent his sperm, which is actually a lot LESS funny than it sounds.

     During the whole DVD, I laughed for about two minutes.  And two minutes out of sixty is a three percent success rate.  So I am giving JB Smoove That’s How I Dooz It a three percent recommendation (even though at one star, it LOOKS like ten percent).  If you only buy 98 stand-up comedy special DVDs this year, this ought to be one of them!