December 18 movie: Rip It Off. Lisa, Shayne and I got together yesterday for Bad Buffy Night, which means watching bad movies that star former cast members of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This involved a complex negotiation to find movies that were first of all, bad, secondly, unviewed by any of us, and third, not totally objectionable because of utter badness or other reasons. For instance, Shayne and I just weren't up for a horror movie, which ruled out Darkness Falls. And we didn't get Cruel Intentions because we'd all seen it.
Anyway, we started out the Bad Buffy extravaganza with Rip It Off, which from the packaging appeared to be a fun Alyson Hannigan (Willow) vehicle about young women doing a casino heist that their boyfriends are unable to pull off. We were expecting a chick Ocean's Eleven. Unfortunately the movie was actually really depressing and ugly and most of the characters are unpleasant and have terrible dialogue. Hannigan isn't as much of the star as we expected, and she plays a lesbian junkie whore and the woman she loves dies at the end. So in other words, the last two seasons of Buffy made this role a natural for her.
On the bright side, the movie also featured Alexis Denisof (Wesley, and Hannigan's real life spouse) as one of the boyfriends. So it was a bad Buffy double-shot, so to speak. Denisof plays a small-time Russian crook who dresses like a jamoke: shiny track pants, sleeveless Tshirts, big gold chain with a cross, and very, very bad hair. He also speaks with the worst Russian accent ever. With a name like Alexis Denisof, you'd think he would have at least one Russian relative to practice the accent with. But no such luck apparently. Denisof isn't quite as evil as the other Russian boyfriend, but close. Also he lives in an apartment with giant spatulas hanging in the kitchen. We rewound over and over, trying to figure out if the spatulas were a decorative element, or it was a trick of perspective and they were just normal spatulas badly filmed. I'm going with the decorative element. And it says something about the movie that the spatulas were the most interesting thing. As the credits rolled Shayne summed it up better than I can: "Now we know why this movie was direct to video."
2 Comments
I've seen Darkness Falls. Well, most of it. Found it far more laughable than scary. Altho in doing some surfing around just now I found several people saying that the first 10 min. or so -- which I didn't see -- were genuinely creepy, so probably y'all made the right call. Still, a horror movie about the Tooth Fairy?!? Who thought THAT was a good idea?
heh, I attempted to sit through all of Rip It Off, but didn't make it. If you still want to do Bad Buffy nights and haven't seen "Simply Irresistible" starring SMG and a hideous lack of chemistry with Sean Patrick Flannery...I actually have it on vhs. Roger Ebert actually liked it because it was a throwback to old hollywood romance films. I kind of enjoyed it, but it really is pretty awful.