How’s this for a premise? Jason Statham falls about a mile from a helicopter and is literally shovelled off the asphalt by Chinese organ thieves who steal his heart for their 100-year-old boss (David Carradine). He wakes up to find he’s been fitted with an artificial heart, and proceeds to tear apart the Los Angeles underworld to get back his “strawberry tart”. Only catch is, to keep going, he needs to constantly charge up by electrocuting himself. I know it sounds like I’m pranking you, but I swear, it’s a real movie. And Jesus, what a movie.

With a premise like that, backed by utter conviction and an understanding of the world apparently formed solely from video games, porn, daytime talk shows and Godzilla movies, Crank: High Voltage delivers… something. I’m not quite sure what it delivers, but it’s something pretty great. You should probably go see it now so that when the inevitable cult forms, you can say you were into it before anyone.

So according to internet legend, Troll 2 was made with an American cast by an Italian director who barely spoke English and insisted the lines be read verbatim from his script. That maybe begins to explain this insane and insanely-bad film, but can’t fully account for the ludicrous acting, amateurish “monster” effects (burlap sacks and immobile masks) or the complete lack of trolls of any sort. It also can’t explain the film’s bizarre fixation on vegetarianism as the moral equivalent of a death cult — it approaches plant-eating with the prurient tut-tutting of a 1960s exploitation flick. But with less nudity.

We watched the RiffTrax version, which was entertaining, but even without it, I think this is probably one of the very films that’s so bad it’s better than good. Even at it’s most retarded, it’s rarely boring.

I’ve been on a big Patton Oswalt kick lately, and on his album Werewolves and Lollipops he talks about this movie at length. So, you know, go follow that link and listen to the bit. It’s hilarious.

And then doing a little research on the internet, I found that this movie has a whole elaborate history to it — beyond the incredible fact a movie about an eating bed was made at all. The first-time (and only-time) director George Barry started the movie in 1972 as a labour of love, finally finished it five years later, and then found nobody wanted to buy it. Period. Not even for the price of striking a print. He shelved it and went on with his life (I think he ran a used book store in Detroit), but unbeknownst to him, one of his development labs somehow pirated it, and it bounced around Europe for decades as a (very) minor underground phenom in the pre-internet. Finally, an astonished Barry found out about the cult it had attracted and give it a much-belated release on DVD in 2002.

So how is Death Bed: The Bed That Eats? Worth the wait? Well, first off, it clearly is a labour of love. Most luridly-titled horror flicks fail to deliver on the title’s promise (see Killdozer, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, or every single movie ever released by the turd factory that is Troma), but not this one — this movie is clearly the work of a man who sought to tell the story of an eating bed. It eats gangsters, hippies, priests and orgies, not to mention flowers, fried chicken, cigars and suitcases, all of which sink into the bed’s “stomach” (a vat of coloured water), accompanied by hearty chomping and chewing sounds.

Weird enough, but that doesn’t even begin to get at just how balls-out bizarre this movie is. For one thing, the movie is narrated by the spirit of an pissed-off-sounding artist who lives behind a painting overlooking the bed. Also, the bed itself falls asleep (and snores), which just raises all kinds of questions. And in the movie’s strangest sequence, a man survives the death bed only to have the flesh eaten from his hands, but instead of, you know: screaming in agony, like you or I might be inclined to do, he just stares forlornly at the skeletal hands emerging from the sleeves of his blazer until his sister helps him out by breaking off the bones and throwing them into a fire!

Unfortunately, while Death Bed gets mad props for effort and originality, it’s easier to admire than to enjoy. It may have El Topo-to-Eraserhead levels of weirdness, but it has the technical proficiency (and budget) of Manos: The Hands of Fate. Half of it is shot in painfully bad day-for-night, and the entire (dubbed) cast acts like they’ve just had a big lunch and are looking for a place to take a nap. Though, hmmm, napping… sleeping… bed… maybe that’s the point?

A notice to Generation Y: the 1980s were not cool. High school was not like John Hughes movies (except that the seemingly-cool chick usually really did end up with the jock or the rich kid in the end). Nobody wore their legwarmers and teased hair ironically– they were just kind of naive and dumb that way. And the only reason you think that the music was cool is because you listen to things that were never on the radio, anyway, unless maybe you lived in London or New York — it was all Phil Collins and Tom Cochrane and Milli Vanilli. And there was no internet, so even if you somehow heard about The Smiths or The Stone Roses on late-night CBC Radio, you had to go to a record store and special-order a record that *might* show up six weeks later. And don’t get me started on the TV.

Director Greg (Superbad) Mottola’s Adventureland, set in 1987, manages to nod to 80s nostalgia without wallowing in it, or making the era seem cooler than it was. Jesse Eisenberg is a kind of Jewish Michael Cera-type, a Renaissance studies grad who is unexpectedly forced to take a summer job at the titular amusement park. He finds a friend’s bag of joints is a ticket into the inner circles of carny society, including bitter nerd Martin Starr and sharp-tongued Kirsten Stewart, who is carrying on a self-loathing affair with married handyman Ryan Reynolds.

Adventureland is funny, but not uproariously so, and it’s not trying to be. It’s more Dazed and Confused than Superbad 2. Unfortunately, it also feels pretty slight, which makes it’s awkward (and I suspect unintended) tonal shifts all the more jarring. A subplot about Eisenberg’s dad’s alcoholism ends up going nowhere, and does so thuddingly. And Bill Hayder and Kristen Wiig appear as the park’s owners, doing such broad comedy that they seem to be living in a separate universe (it’s like an SNL sketch dropped into American Graffitti). But that said, I was really charmed with the movie. Sure the music sucked at the time, but even for a nostalgia-hater like myself, the pre-ironic 80s is a nice place to spend an hour and a half occassionally.

All the cool nerds are weighing in on Watchmen, so I figure I might as well, too.

Up front, and as a big fan of the graphic novel, I’ll say I liked it quite a bit, but I didn’t love it. Director Zack Snyder clearly worships the source material and makes his movie as uncompromisingly faithful as any $120 million movie could ever be, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great flick. To be honest, I’ve never really bought into the ideas that (a) no work of art is complete until it’s been made into a movie; and (b) fidelity to the source material is a sensible criterion for success. It always seems to me that the supposition is that the film is somehow supposed to be taking the place of the original, but of course, it never works that way and it seems disrespectful both to the original work and the idea of film as its own artform. With Watchmen-the-comic, you can take your time with the many dense, expository pages, and take in the details, but use the same pages as a storyboard and put them up on the screen, and it seems congested.

Also, in spite of the fidelity to the plot, there are a few major changes. The one that bugged me most was more tonal than anything, and that’s the whole slow-mo, violence-is-cool Zack Snyder-thing. Anywhere the book could have had an action sequence became an action sequence. And anywhere there was an action scene, it became both physically implausible and gory. The comicbook Comedian doesn’t go face-first through a granite counter and come up fighting, and the comic Night Owl and Silk Spectre don’t enthusiastically snap necks and cut throats. It’s the same aesthetic that puts “Hallelujah” in a sex scene and “All Along the Watchtower” into a scene involving a watchtower. So that, I found jarring. At the same time, subplots that don’t move the main story forward were jettisoned, which speeds the action along, but gives the story even less room to breathe. Especially since the missing material is mostly about non-costumed characters. The world of the film seems to be entirely populated by superheroes and Richard Nixon, which robs the ending of a lot of its impact.

On the plus, side, though, the one completely new scene — the credit sequence showing scenes of alternate history — was pretty damn brilliant. It hints at what a looser, less reverent adaptation might have been like. And the one major change — the squid-less ending — may (blasphemy!) work better than the book’s version, which felt awkward pre-9/11 and naive post-9/11.

I’m actually looking forward to the supposed 4-hour DVD version, which would restore a lot of the missing material. It might be long, but you can spread it out over a couple of evenings, just like reading the book. I almost felt the movie was striving toward that, and I wonder if the DVD version might, in fact, be Snyder’s ultimate goal?