Let me start out by saying, overall, this movie didn’t stand out. For better or worse. It wasn’t excellent, it wasn’t unwatchable either. However, make no mistake when/if going to see this movie. It IS a chick-flick in every sense of the word. Some positives from the movie? The casting. It has to be. Right? The studio spent however many millions getting everyone and their niece (literally, one of the actresses is Julia Roberts niece). And for the most part they are good. There’s a couple things that surprise you though, Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel’s hook-up is kinda uncomfortable to watch. Ashton Kutcher’s character is probably on-screen more than anyone else, and he and Jessica Alba/Jennifer Garner’s relationship is probably the “main” story line if there was one at all.  All the other acting was good, and I don’t feel like going in-depth for each character (remember, about 20!), but I don’t think you would look at anyone’s acting and say it was bad (save for Taylor Swift, I’ll explain more later).

However, because there were SO many story lines going on at once, it was hard for me to really feel a connection to any of the characters. We only got 2-5 mins with each character at a time before switching to another story. For me, that made it really hard to grow any sort of attachment to any of the characters. This isn’t their fault, that falls on the writers/director. If you’re going to make a movie with more than 3 or 4 story lines, you have to make me concerned with whats going to happen in each one. That simply wasn’t the case for me here, I only vaguely cared about one story line, and the rest seemed like interruptions to that story. Ultimately, disappointing.

Taylor Swift’s acting is awful. AWFUL. There isn’t another word for it. I’ll admit, her songs are catchy, and I respect that she can write her own music and write her own lyrics and win Grammy’s for it. BUT STOP THERE! Do not try to act, it’s just not for you. I fear you might think I’m being harsh, but to try to prove my point. There is one scene where she has to do some silly dance moves while being interviewed by local TV. This is her best scene. When she isn’t speaking, or having to have dialogue  with (just barely better) Taylor Lautner, or show emotion on her face.

End-note: Eric Dane and Bradley Cooper play a gay couple, though it isn’t revealed until the end of the movie, some patron’s in the movie behind me obviously had strong opinions about that situation. For example, when Eric Dane’s character announced he’s gay at a press conference, the lovely couple behind me in unison say “that’s disgusting”. And of course at the end when we find out that Bradley Cooper is his love interest, yet another “that’s disgusting” resounded from behind me.

Overall, if your girl wants to go see this movie take her, because that’s never a bad idea (you might get lucky), and I don’t think you’d be too miserable (except when the Taylor’s are on-screen together). But if you have other options, excercise them instead.

***The following contains spoilers…if you really care***

With a tagline like, “What Would You Do With A Letter That Changed Everything?” I think to myself, “Stop, don’t open it. It must not be good news!” Which is exactly my response to Dear John…It’s all bad news, well mostly!

Special Forces Army Sergeant John Tyree (Channing Tattum) is moping around on his two-week leave until he meets Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried),when he saves her purse that fell into the Ocean, like magic, romantic sparks begin to fly. As John and Savannah take you on a journey of them falling in love I sat there thinking, “What was the Casting Director thinking?” I couldn’t see or feel any emotional connection between the characters. Thirty minutes into the movie I knew I just wasted $10.25. As the movie progressed and we were introduced to John’s Father, Mr. Tyree (Richard Jenkins), I finally caught a glimpse of good acting. Although it was implied Mr. Tyree was afflicted with Aspergers or Autism, illnesses that both keep the afflicted individual incapable of showing emotion. I found that the only emotional moments came from the talented Richard Jenkins. Thus the sub-plot of the relationship between John, who struggled for his Fathers affection, and Mr. Tyree who wanted to be affectionate with John, but due to his illness was unable. As the time drew near for John to return to his Army Unit and Savannah returned to college they promised each other to write one another so they could feel like they were never actually apart. The movie showed John in all sorts of locations with his Unit as he and Savannah wrote letters to one another. At a pivotal point in the film John is with his Unit when they see the news of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. Along with the rest of his Unit, John decides to re-sign with the Army, knowing this will keep him from being with Savannah. Given a weekend pass he meets with Savannah and reveals to her he re-signed with the Army. Devastated, Savannah tries to hold herself together and keep her hopes alive of one day being with John. Eventually she can’t take it anymore and falls in love with a long time family friend. She sends a letter to John, who is now in Afghanistan, telling him she can’t wait for him any longer and she is engaged to be married to another man. This sets John into a tail spin, and it puts us through 10 minutes of some of the worst acting, ever. John throws away all the letters Savannah ever wrote him and throws himself into his work, “being all that he can be,” until he receives word that his Father is in the hospital suffering from a stroke. John comes home to visit his Father and on his Father’s death bed they share a heartfelt moment as they both finally make an emotional connection that once seemed impossible (In my opinion, the best scene in the entire film, thanks to Richard Jenkins). After Mr. Tyree’s death, John meets with Savannah once again to learn that her husband is in the hospital fighting cancer. Although he knows she is “off the market” he sells his Fathers precious coin collection and anonymously donates money to Savannah to pay for special medication that will allow her to spend 2 more months with her husband, at home, before he finally passes. Umm, John, who the hell does that? What man, in his right mind, after being done dirty, will still try to prove his love to a woman by giving her large sums of money so she can spend 2 more months with her husband? Get over it John! Just like I got over wasting $10.25 to watch this horrible movie.

This evening, Mr. Mac and I had the distinct privilege of screening The Wolfman hosted by AintItCoolNews at Alamo South in Austin, TX. As a bonus, producer Scott Stuber was on hand for a Q&A on the film. He was kind enough to bring the print to Austin to make our audience the first audience in the world to see The Wolfman. One day before the premiere in LA. And to top it off, Scott Stuber gave us a little hint of something in the works…

I went into this film with nothing. I had zero interest in it. But to say that I was swayed by free beer, food and swag, is far from the truth. Joe Johnston created what a Wolfman movie needed to be. Just a Wolfman movie.

Joe and his team which included long time makeup artist Rick Baker created what The Wolfman from 1941 did. Realistic practical man-to-wolf transformations that gave the film a better feel than CGI. CGI was used, but it was hardly there. As for the story, this was more than just a horror film. Benicio Del Toro brought the same depth to the character that Lon Chaney did years ago. We’re not talking Oscar worthy, not even by a long shot. Co-starring with Benicio was Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving who brought great supporting roles to Del Toro. The real kicker is Anthony Hopkins. According to JoBlo.com when asked how he prepares for roles, Hopkins replied, “I just remember my lines. Thats all there is to it.” That guy rules.

As for the hint of something? Scott was kind enough to let us know that he is in talks with Guillermo del Toro to remake Frankenstein. One can only imagine how del Toro will envision Frankenstein.

Whats it worth? Well considering it was free for us here at WRT, (as lucky as we are sometimes) its worth the 8 bucks a pop plus soda and popcorn. Mmm, delicious butter dripped popcorn.

So far we are into episode 3 of Caprica on SyFy. I’ll admit, the 2 hour pilot started off slow, ended with a Richard Moore-esque bang. The second episode followed suit. Now in the third, the pace has picked up a bit and is starting to unveil more story. the Greystones and the Adamas are becoming deeper characters. Its interesting to see what will happen now that Zoe has access to the holoworld. Im also glad to see that Luciana Carro (BSG’s Kat) is making a return to this universe, she was a strong actor for her role in Battlestar.  Leave your thoughts on this episode and the series in the comments.

A WRT Guest Review by Mary T.

Within the first ten minutes of playing Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 it hits you: this is not the Mass Effect of 2007. It’s sleeker, grittier, and darker than the original installment, and it plays more like a third person shooter with a strong RPG influence than it does an RPG with a mild shooter influence. Bioware made a lot of changes to the mechanics of the original game, leaving the epic storyline intact while vastly improving the playability and battle mechanics. Be sure to make the jump to read my full review.

The game immediately throws you into the thick of things. You’re Commander Shepard, and you’ve awoken to the sounds of battle on a strange space station that you’ve never seen before. A stranger’s voice tells you to get up and get your gear, because you have to fight your way out of there or you’re dead. Players of the original game will immediately notice the changes Bioware made to the combat controls to the point where a read through the instructional manual that came with the game is almost mandatory. Gone are the days of walking Shepard up to an obstacle to make the commander take cover or pushing on the left joystick to squat. They took the best elements from third person shooters like Gears of War and first person shooters like Call of Duty and added them to their previous combat model. Interactions with the surrounding environment are enhanced. You can run and dive for cover and deftly vault over obstacles instead of tediously lumbering up them. Hardcore RPG players with limited shooter experience may find the new combat system has a learning curve, but the improvement to game play that the changes afford are worth the effort. Combat is more challenging and has a new sense of urgency in this installment. You still have tech and biotic powers at your disposal, but with this new combat system they become more effective and integrated into combat strategy. Players of the original will notice the addition of heavy weapons to their arsenal, a welcome and effective change that becomes indispensable later on in the game. Previous players will also notice that overheating their weapons is no longer a concern, but ammo becomes an issue. Your weapons are no longer gifted with an unlimited supply of bullets. Instead, you have to search the battlefield and the area around you for clips of ammunition to prevent running dry in the middle of combat. Bioware mitigates the potential annoyance of running out of ammunition by making all weapons except for heavy weapons take the same kind of ammo, so you won’t have to back track your merry band of interstellar adventurers in search of more rounds specifically for your sniper rifle while your assault rifle has a full clip. Finding ammo for heavy weapons becomes a little more problematic, but so long as you don’t have Commander Shepard fragging everyone in sight with a grenade launcher, there should be enough to get you through the game.

Bioware also made vast changes to weapons customizations. It’s no longer necessary to reduce obsolete gear into omni-gel to make room in your inventory for new equipment. Instead, the game provides you with a greatly reduced selection of weapon models that you can research upgrades for in your ship’s laboratory. While this reduces the potential for customization of your gear, it frees up a lot of in-game time for actually playing the game instead of managing your inventory, making the overall experience more streamlined. Finding the necessary materials to upgrade your items can become tedious, however.  The Mako is completely absent from the sequel, but you’re still on a never-ending quest to survey elements on distant planets. Now, instead of merely getting achievements for finding a lot of minerals that otherwise have no value, you use those elements to conduct research for upgrades in your lab. To find the necessary elements you have to scan planets and launch probes at their surface. While this method of finding elements is more game-relevant and much preferable to navigating the clunky mechanics of the Mako, it still eats up a lot of time that could have been better spent fragging bad guys.

Your armor has changed as well. You no longer have a single piece of N7 armor with customizable slots, but instead each piece of armor is separate and gives Shepard different bonuses during game play. New pieces of armor with different bonuses can be purchased in shops, making Shepard’s armor more versatile than it was in the first game. You can also customize the appearance and color scheme of your armor, if you feel like taking the time to make your Shepard look pretty (which I did). Your party’s armor is not customizable, however, so you only get to tweak Shepard’s stats. The overall durability of your party can be affected by upgrades you research in your lab, but otherwise their defenses are out of your hands. Again, this reduces the potential for customization of your party but makes the overall gaming experience more game play-centric.

Character customization in this new installment has been greatly reduced. Each character class has a much shorter list of available powers and less overlap with other classes, making each character’s usefulness in combat more distinct and the selection of party members more important to your overall success in a mission. While the lack of some powers that used to be at your character’s disposal will be glaring at first, most players will likely find that they quickly adapt to the new system and that it again serves to streamline the overall game experience. The points you gain at levels are no longer spread thin over a long list of powers. Now you can focus on the true strength of your character class and integrate those strengths into your party and combat.

For all the changes that Bioware made to the mechanics of the game, the storyline certainly did not suffer. One element missing is the diverse array of side quests that gave the first game a less linear feel. Bioware has shifted almost all the time spent in game focusing on the main storyline with little other distractions. Another change is the aforementioned grittiness of the game. I feel as though Bioware decided to test the boundaries of their M rating. After all, if they were given an M for a single, potentially girl-on-girl sex scene in which the worst thing you saw was a naked butt cheek for two seconds in the first game, and they had no intention of changing the option of having a relationship that you had to avidly pursue in-game that could potentially end in sex, then why not? There is a lot more blood in this installment and the language is a lot more colorful. So far, these particular changes seem to have avoided the scrutiny of the media. The damage has apparently already been done, and we’re more concerned as a society about seeing two consenting adult ladies getting nasty than we are about the ability of one adult to blow another, unconsenting adult’s  brains out with a head shot from a sniper rifle.

The changes aside, all the rest of the old story elements are there, with your choices as a player affecting elements of the story and reactions of other characters towards your Shepard. Paragon and renegade points become more integrated into the game play, with optional triggers during dialogue scenes allowing Shepard to take decisively goody-goody or bad ass actions, dramatically affecting the results of interactions with other characters. Thankfully the old system of paragon and renegade points remains intact, with each cache of points on a different scale as opposed to on the same scale a la light side and dark side points in the Knights of the Old Republic games. You can still have a mostly upstanding Shepard who occasionally pushes someone out a window or a mostly calloused Shepard who can sometimes be moved to pull an innocent bystander out of the line of fire without that single action dramatically affecting your overall moral standing. Developing relationships with other members of your crew also remains an option during game play and in fact becomes vital to your survival in this game. You have to gain the loyalty of your crew members if you want to survive the perilous mission that lies before you. There is a new sense of tension and urgency in this game that was not in the previous installment, augmented by the new combat system but mostly driven by the turn Shepard’s story has taken between the first Mass Effect and this one.  Continuity between games is seamlessly integrated into the story. If you load a character from the first Mass Effect, the choices you made in the first game can have dramatic effects on the story of the second. Relationships carry over from one game to the next, though not in ways you may have wanted. Only two playable members of the original crew join on with Shepard for this new quest, and none of them (to my great disappointment) are the potential love interests from the first game. This opens up a slew of new relationship options, but the choices you make concerning new relationships affect your old relationships. If you successfully consummated a relationship in the first installment of the game, Shepard will have a picture of your love interest on the desk in your quarters. Pursue and successfully consummate a new relationship in the second game and that picture will be turned face down on the desk afterwards, indicating a potentially explosive final fallout with your original interest in the upcoming Mass Effect 3. Oh yes, your decisions in this game can have far reaching consequences, and it’s that continuity of decisions affecting outcomes throughout the entire series that gives Mass Effect 2 the immersive quality that typifies the series. You are Commander Shepard, and your choices really do matter. Your fate, the fate of your crew, and the fate of the galaxy depend on them.

With the second installment in the Mass Effect trilogy, Bioware has proven why they’re one of the top names in the gaming industry and why they’re swiftly becoming the top name in the role playing game experience. They’ve taken to the genre to the pinnacle of its potential with Mass Effect 2 and will undoubtedly push the boundaries even further in the third and final game. It seems an almost insurmountable challenge to improve upon Mass Effect 2, but if anyone can succeed, it’s Bioware and the Mass Effect team. This was truly the most satisfying gaming experience I’ve had in years and I cannot recommend this game enough.

11:33 Thats it!

11:33AM ”We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts — we want to make the best tech, but have them be intuitive. It’s the combination of these two things that have let us make the iPad.”

“This is a magical device, at a breakthrough price.”

11:31AM ”We think we’ve got the goods. We think we’ve done it. Another thing we’re excited about is that there’s already 75m people who know how to use this because of how many iPhones and iPod touches we’ve shipped.”

11:30AM ”Do we have what it takes to establish a third category of products?”

11:30AM One last thing????

11:27AM ”The iPad is the most advanced piece of tech that I’ve ever worked on at Apple.”

11:26AM No phone calls from what we can tell.

11:26AM So to recap. No multitasking. No word on notifications.

11:21AM ”We’ve got some really great accessories. First one is a dock. You know the slideshow I showed you? When it’s in the dock you have a great picture frame. We have another dock that’s interesting… the keyboard dock.” What!?

11:20AM ”We will be shipping these in 60 days. 3G models will ship in 90 days.”

11:20AM ”So $499 for 16GB of iPad. That’s our base model. 32GB is $599, 64GB is $799. 3G models cost an extra $130. $629, 729, and 829 with 3G.”

11:18AM ”And just like we were able to meet or exceed our tech goals, we have met our cost goals… iPad pricing starts at $499.”

11:18AM ”If you listen to the pundits, we’re going to price it under $1000, which is code for $999. When we set out to develop this, we had ambitious tech goals, but we had aggressive price goals.”

11:17AM ”What should we price it at?”

11:17AM ”And the new iBooks application. You can carry literally thousands of books around. And the iWork suite of apps with the best UI we’ve ever seen for something like this.”

11:17AM ”WiFI plus 3G if you want it. So iPad. It’s phenomenal. Email is fantastic, best device for photos, great for music, great for video. It runs almost all of the 140k apps on the app store, as well as a whole new generation of apps.”

11:16AM ”So we have a breakthrough deal in the US. We hope to have our international deals in the June / July timeframe. However, all of the iPad 3G models are unlocked, and they use the new GSM microSIMs.”

11:15AM ”So how do you turn this on and manage it? You can activate this right on the iPad. And there’s no contract — it’s prepaid.”

11:14AM ”We have a breakthrough deal with AT&T.” Wow. Some serious sharp intakes of breath here.

11:14AM ”We have an unlimited plan for just $29.99 a month.”

11:14AM ”Now what does it cost for the data plans? Well in the US carriers charge about $60 a month. We have a real breakthrough. Two awesome plans for iPad owners. The first one gives you 250MB of data a month for $14.99.”

11:13AM ”Now I’d like to talk about wireless networking. Every iPad has WiFi… but we’re also going to have models with 3G.”

11:12AM ”Isn’t it great?” Some slight hesitation. “A few other things. I’d like to talk for a minute about iTunes. The iPad syncs over USB just like an iPhone or iPod.”

11:12pm Steve is back.

11:11AM And the iWork demo is done. “So what are we going to charge for applications like this? We’re gong to charge just $9.99 each.” He means $10 for Pages, $10 for Keynote… etc.

11:10AM It looks as though these new dropdowns menus are a major part of the iPad OS. Will be interesting to see how this translates to the iPhone and iPod touch. Is there going to be room? Or will they be left out entirely?

11:03AM We’ll say this — iWork looks really robust. Far more than an iPhone app. Lots of options, lots of ways to work with your data.

11:02AM They’ve really redone this interface. We don’t know about you, but using iWork wasn’t one of our fantasies when we thought about what an Apple tablet would be like. This is nice… but it’s iWork.

11:00AM Phil is showing off spreadsheets “It’s cool and easy to use.”

11:00AM Phil is out. “Good morning everyone. iWork is a suite of apps that millions of customers love.”

10:59AM ”Could the tablet handle that? You betcha. But they required a new UI — here’s Phil Schiller to tell you about it.”

10:57AM ”So iBooks again, a great reader, a great online bookstore. All in one really great app. We use the ePub format. We’re very excited about this.”

10:57AM ”You can change the font… whatever you want. And that is iBooks.”

10:56AM The store is very similar to iTunes. Same modal pop-overs. Pricing doesn’t look too bad. The book page display is nice. You can turn pages slowly — really slick looking page animation.

10:54AM ”It has a bookshelf. In addition there’s a button which is the store — we’ve created the new iBook Store. You can download right onto your iPad.”

10:53AM ”Isn’t that awesome? These guys only had two weeks. So we’ve seen some really great apps. Let me show you another… one of our apps. That’s an ebook reader. Now Amazon has done a great job of pioneering this… we’re going to stand on their shoulders for this. Our new app is called iBooks.”

10:52AM Scott: “While we wait for those apps to come out, we can all run our existing apps… and that is the app story for the iPad.” And Steve is back.

10:49 – Something about MLB.com, I really didnt notice. Or cared.

10:47AM Travis Boatman from EA is up. “When Apple invited us to come on site, we couldn’t have been more excited. But we wanted to check out this device’s performance as gamers.”

10:44AM ”Next is Brushes. It’s an extremely popular app.” Steve Sprang from Brushes is up.

10:42AM ”We think we’ve captured the essence of reading the newspaper. A superior experience in a native application.” Wow, the layout is just like a standard paper, and again we’ve got those dropdown context menus. You can resize text with a pinch.

10:40AM ”The iPad version of Nova ships later this year…” Interesting. Scott is back. “Next up, the New York Times.”

10:39AM Showing off their FPS Nova. “I can slide the d-pad on the screen…” You can set up your own controls. New gestures for interacting with games. This isn’t anything breathtaking just yet — fairly standard graphics (though nice), nothing new in terms of interaction.

10:35AM ”So all of the iPhone apps will run on this. In fact when you buy it, download all the apps you have right onto the iPad. Now if the developer spends some time modifying their app, they can take full advantage of this display.”

10:33AM ”Let’s start with Facebook. It just works.” He’s showing off the non-pixel doubled version, a small app in the middle of the screen. It’s kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen. The scaled up app looks silly as well, especially in Facebook.

10:31AM Can run all iPhone apps unmodified out of the box.

10:31AM ”Now, let’s go back to software. We’ve seen some great built in apps. Let’s talk about third party. Let’s talk about the app store.” Scott Forstall is out!

10:30AM ”What is the battery life like? We’ve been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life. I can take a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole time. And it has over a month of standby time.”

10:29AM Available in 16GB, 32, 64…

10:29AM ”It’s powered by our own silicon. The 1GHz Apple A4 chip. It screams.”

10:28AM Full capacitive multitouch

10:28AM ”Let’s go back to the hardware.” .5 inches thin, 1.5 pounds — 9.7 inch IPS display

10:25AM ”Let’s go to YouTube. I know this clip is in HD. I can go full screen.”

10:24AM Steve is in Maps now. Zooming looks super fast — no idea what this chip is, but it has no trouble handling pretty graphically intense stuff. Everything looks polished — zero hiccup. “Now here’s street view…” Wow. Big applause for that. “Now let me show you video.”

10:23AM Now he’s showing off calendar. Some new looks here.

10:22AM ”Let me show you a few other things. The iTunes store is built right in. I can sample music, buy songs.” The interface has modals that pop over what you’re viewing to show you song / album info.

10:20AM Now we’re watching a photo slideshow… just like iPhoto, cute music and all.

10:20AM Places in the photo app, that is.

10:20AM Now Steve is flipping through photos. Places is up now — Google Maps in effect!

10:18AM ”Next, photos… this is what photos looks like. I can look at everything as a list of photos. I can tap on it…” Flicks and gestures just like the iPhone.

10:15AM No flash here… the missing plugin icon is on screen.

10:14AM It’s essentially a huge Mobile Safari — looks really really slick.

10:10AM ”We think we’ve got something that is better. And we call it the iPad.”

10:09AM ”What kind of tasks? Browsing the web. Doing email. Enjoying and sharing pics. Watching videos. Enjoying music. Playing games. Reading ebooks.”

10:07AM ”Let’s go back to 1991, when we first shipped our Powerboks. The first with a TFT screen, the first with palm rests, and had an integrated pointing device. Just a few years ago in 2007 we reinvented the phone… and a few years later we got the iPhone 3GS.”

10:06AM ”And by revenue… it’s even bigger than Nokia.”

12:01pm    

11:43am

The 9^th movie of the night was a Shaw Brother’s creation by that goes by the prophetic title of Centipede Horror.  This Japanese film is about, you guessed it, cursed monster centipedes doing fucked up stuff.  Only they’re just regular centipedes.  And they don’t really do anything.  OK, so it’s a little more complicated that, what with the magicians and the ancient family curse and the trips to South East Asia (which is exactly how they kept referring to it in the films – at least the subtitled version), but you don’t really need to know about any of that, trust me.  All you need to know about this film’s plot is that at one point a bucket of centipedes and black sludge falls out of a girl’s nether parts at the same time that she is vomiting up live centipedes from her mouth (like, for real – the actress really loaded her mouth up with centipedes and them slowly spit them out / let them crawl across her lips, nose and mouth).

So you’re likely wondering, how can this film lose?  I’ll put it this way: for every 3 interesting minutes, there are 90 boring minutes, and the movie is only 93 minutes long according to IMDB.  It felt a lot longer than that to me, though, which in itself is never a good thing.  One of the main problems can easily be seen in this trailer:

This movie suffers in the same way as most other nature attacks movies; seeing some girl trip and fall, then roll around and scream as she is covered with centipedes, is just not scary.  Horrible, sometimes maybe even horribly funny, but not frightening.

That’s not all that is wrong with Centipede Horror, though.  The pacing is awful, and there is very little action and a ton of Japanese dialogue.  Not a good mix for a sub-titled horror film.  The acting was campy, especially in the supposed-to-be-tense moments, such as a wizard duel or the various centipede attacks.

The fact is the film in intended to make you squirm.  That’s it.  Unfortunately, the foundation on which the film is built is too weak to hold up even the gross out moments, and I was ready to move on to the next film before the opening credits finished rolling on Centipede Horror, which is too bad, as I’m not against gross-out horror, and usually love to enjoy a cold beer and gut-roll at the hilariously wild deaths and ill-conceived plots.  There just isn’t enough here to even provide that little bit of enjoyment.

What’s it worth?  Nothing.  Zip.  Zilch.  It’s not even worth the 93 minutes it takes to watch the movie.  Stay far, far away from Centipede Horror, lest you be cursed for your something something centipede vagina something something wizard something something The End.

3…

2…

1…

So what happens when you give a mute (potentially autistic?) little boy a handgun?  People fucking die.  And that’s why ‘70s exploitation films are so awesome.  Candy, the daughter of a jewelry store manager, is abducted then buried alive (then unburied, then raped, then reburied) by three small time (and bumbling) crooks that are looking for a quick ransom.  Unfortunately for them, and Candy, her father is a selfish douche-canoe who is shagging his assistant, and her mother is so drunk she barely notices that her daughter hasn’t been home for days.  The father steals a bag-full of jewelry as requested, but instead of rescuing his daughter, he attempts to bribe his part-time lover into running away with him to someplace sunny.

Meanwhile, our pint-sized murderer (whose name I can’t remember and can’t decipher from IMDB, so I will call him Hit-Boy) witnesses the kidnapping but can’t talk and can’t get his parents, who are only a leg behind Candy’s for the worst-couple-to-ever-birth-a-child award, to pay him any mind.  This is a movie full of kidnapping, rape, torture, adultery, and murder, and Hit-Boy’s mother is the bitch I most wanted to see die.  She is one of the most unpleasant characters ever captured on film, and by the end I hated her even more than the Candy snatching, child raping murderers.  One of the greatest moments of the film, its cherry on top, if you will, is the very end.

Candy is scraping away at the inside of her makeshift coffin while her father and Rapist #2 shoot it out above her.  The father falls, but there is some hope that Candy will be OK, because Rapist #2 feels bad about all this, and seeing as his partners are dead, he’s probably going to rescue her.  Then Hit-Boy pops up and blasts the guy.  So here we have this odd looking little boy who’s spent the entire movie either being weird or being yelled at, staring down the smoking barrel of the bad-guys six shooter.  Cinematic gold, I tell you.  Hit-Boy fumbles around the coffin for a bit, but his harpy of a mother is screaming for him in the background.  He walks away from the coffin, in which Candy is still begging for help, and the screen fades to black.  And BANG!  The mother goes silent.  Roll credits.  Fucking awesome.

The Candy Snatchers is dark as hell, but a lot of fun.  The cast, mostly people I’ve never heard of, deliver serviceable performances as laughably terrible people, but Candy Snatchers is all about delivering shocking, unbelievable moments, and it never pretends otherwise.  If you’re into exploitation films, this is a great example of the genre.  You’ll also probably enjoy the following trailer, presented to you by YouTube:  *WARNING* Trailer contains violence, foul language, and Tiffany Bolling’s boobs.

So what’s a 36 year old, out of print exploitation film Worth?  As much as I enjoyed the film, new copies of the DVD are running over $40, and I just can’t suggest you spend that kind of money to see it.  That said, if you have Netflix, you can have The Candy Snatchers delivered right to your mailbox for a fee that you’re already paying.  If not, check out your local rental joint, you might get lucky.  Worth: $5.00.