NFL '07 - Week 15

Last week's lame 6-10 showing dropped the season to 89-96; add two more to the loss column as both early picks this week floundered.

NO -4 vs. AZ

TB -12.5 vs. Atl

Mia + 3.5 vs. Bal: The Dolphins have to win sometime. Don't they?

Buf + 5.5 at Cle: If the Browns are going to make any noise in the post-season it needs to start here and now. But I think the combination of rotten weather, Buffalo's running game and the sputtering Browns offense (not to mention the indifferent defense) make this one an Upset Special.

GB - 7.5 at StL: I don't like this line at all; terrible Rams still have a way of tightening the score late in games. Still, the disparity between the clubs is just too great.

Pit - 3.5 vs. Jax: Steelers rebound after humiliation last week.

NE -21 vs. NYJ: Hoo-boy, this should be ugly. Snow, video cams, general hatred. Is there a good parolee to operate the snow plow?

Sea -7 at Car

Ten - 3.5 at KC

Oak + 10.5 vs. Ind

SD -10 vs. Det

Dal -10 vs. Phi: Today's marquee matchup, but Eagles are slowly spinning out of control while Cowboys are just getting into their stride.

Was + 4.5 at NYG: Giants are the better team, but they have a remarkable ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and this spread is just fat enough to take the underdogs.

Min -10 vs. Chi: Been a while since the Vikes were favored this much over Da Bears. Thirty years, maybe? (Monday night)

Family Schlock

Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as John F. Kennedy in Bubba-Ho-Tep. If you show this film to the family it could lead into an interesting and highly educational discussion of these American icons.

A recent email reads, "Patrick, please take me off your mailing list. Please."

And Ken in Amenia, N.Y. asks, "Hey, are there any drill-bit killer flicks appropriate for family viewing?"

Ken, do you see that van down the street? The one with all the aerials? They're going to answer your question.

But Ken got me thinking - are there enough trashy films available to give everybody a laugh and not get too deep into your typical "half-naked killer nun armed with large power tools defeats forces of Satan at exclusive haunted prep school" scenario?

Of course there are. I give you:

• The entire Aztec Mummy series. These are all harmless fun - hell, the first three are practically the same movie - although the one with the lady wrestlers is dearest to my heart. All ages.
• Any Hammer Films production of a Dracula script with Christopher Lee. These aren't any more violent than an episode of "Hot Teenage Witches and Their Vampire Boyfriends Stopping Evil With Their Exposed Midriffs and Rippling Abs, Respectively." And a great deal spookier, and with just enough decolletage from the various village maids and touring English gentlewomen to interest a 13 year old boy (and, by default, 90 percent of the adult male heterosexual population). I'd say 12 and up.
• Bubba-Ho-Tep. How Elvis and JFK defeat an ancient - and nasty - Egyptian mummy in an East Texas nursing home. Some mild bathroom humor and a couple of creepy moments. 12 and up.
• And this bargain DVD should really grace every home's collection: Roger Corman's Creature Movies vol. I , with three pieces of entertaining dreck from the early 1960s: The Creature From the Haunted Sea, The Beast from the Haunted Cave, and the best of the bunch, The Wasp Woman (which is not about Sharon, but could be about Greenwich). All ages.

Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman: "Okay, honey! You go ahead and run for PTO president! I'll make the Belgian waffles!"

NFL '07 - Week 15: The Early Games...of Zero Interest to Anybody Except Gamblers

Back in rotten form last week with a depressing 6-10.

This week the league geniuses offer the public not one but two meaningless games early in the week: Denver (minus one) at Houston tonight and Cincinnati (minus eight) at San Francisco Saturday.

The Broncos and Texans are technically still in the playoff hunt; the combined rosters of the Bengals and Niners can't even spell "playoff."

That the league insists on making these games showcase events means - to me - that deep down they know that a significant part of the viewing audience has money on the games.

And thus I would take the two favorites and lay the points.

The Cinema - If Only JFK Had Lived Peter Lawford Wouldn't Have Been Forced To MakeThis Film

Angels' Brigade (1979) is a real Pure-D piece of dreck that features several character actors at the end of their careers and at least as many breasts. All are fully-clad - character actors and breasts - which is a mixed blessing.

The movie, directed by Greydon Clark, also illustrates the good common sense of the old saying: "Never thrust anything that comes from a man with two last names."

The plot runs like this: After a schoolboy gets roughed up by the winner of the World's Most Obvious Drug Dealer award, his teacher decides to take action and rid the school of the scourge of illegal drugs.

So she forms a working group of concerned parents, teachers, community leaders and law enforcement officials and...

Nope. Sorry. What she does is recruit a disco singer from Las Vegas who in turn knows a whole bunch of other women who just happen to look good in jumpsuits. They buy a van and a motorcycle, steal a bunch of guns and ammo from Jim Backus and his merry band of right-wing nuts, and take it to the drug baron (Peter Lawford) and his evil Number One (Jack Palance).

Along the way they encounter Alan Hale, Pat Buttram and Arthur Godfrey (as himself).

Jack Palance: Take it easy, honey - that's my truss!

Massive jiggling. Kung fu. Peter Lawford committing modern art. Jack Palance eaten by dog. Black lady with a veritable ziggurat of hair. One of the worst songs ever recorded, "Shine Your Love." Gratuitous white people in Vegas audience clapping on the wrong beat to "Shine Your Love."

We're talking Non-Sequitur City.

One coil.

NFL '07 - Week 14

The dog-ass Redskins up and won their game Thursday so we begin the week with one in the loss column.

The picks:

NYG +3 at Phi

Cle -3 at NYJ - The Titans - er, Jets - have been in the games recently, but I don't see them defending well against the run today.

Jax - 10.5 vs. Car: I've been getting creamed picking the Panthers and I finally figured out why. They're not very good.

Dal - 10.5 vs. Det

Mia +7 at Buf: Notice that the abbreviation for Miami is the same as "Missing in Action?" Anyway, the 'Fins have been staying in games too.

Oak +10.5 at GB

Pit +10.5 at NE: Two close calls against vastly inferior teams in the last two weeks make me think that a much better club stands a good chance of keeping this within the 10 and a half.

Ten even vs. SD: Marginally better numbers plus home field plus greater urgency equals Titans.

StL +7 at Cin

TB -3 at Hou

Sea -7 vs. AZ

Min - 8.5 at SF

KC + 6.5 at Den

Bal +9 vs. Ind

NO -3.5 vs. Atl (Monday night)

NFL '07 - Week 14 (early game)

Last week's 10-6 got the season mark against the spread nearer the plimsoll mark, to 83-86-8.

This week, after observing the Washington meltdown vs. Buffalo, I look to the Chicago Bears (+3) to ice the Redskins for good at SnyderLand Field.

And after watching Ricky Williams last about 20 seconds in his return in the Jets-Miami "When Worlds Collide" game, I am manfully refraining from trotting out the immortal "Haiku for Ricky Williams." It would amount to kicking a stoner when he's down.

In Praise of Schlock, or Why Does an Adult Sit in the Dark Watching Movies About Cross-Eyed Gorillas and Hopping Chinese Vampires?

It wasn't until college that I became interested in the B movie. As a teenager my pals and I had haunted the art houses of Washington, D.C. and watched anything that held the promise of nudity, or films that had a reputation as favorites of the "Let's drop a couple of tabs, smoke a joint and smuggle in a bottle of Bacardi 151" set.

So we saw things like 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen at the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue, or Wild Strawberries, or midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Key Theater on Wisconsin Avenue.

But in college, majoring in cinema and English, the life-changing event came my sophomore year when the Denison University Film Society brought us Night of the Living Dead, which I saw with my buddy Steve Lander.

I had never seen anything like it. The deadpan, flat, documentary tone of the film, the relentlessly grey imagery, and those damn zombies that just kept coming - we were climbing out of our seats.

After graduation someone bought me a copy of Calvin Trillin's "American Stories," a collection of New Yorker pieces which included an account of the rise and fall of Joe Bob Briggs, drive-in movie columnist for the then Dallas Times-Herald.

Trillin's narrative was so funny I immediately tracked down "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In," a collection of the actual reviews that eventually got the Briggs character into trouble.

And if reading about Joe Bob (in real life, a journalist named John Bloom) was amusing, the stuff published in a major American newspaper was unbelieveable.

I was especially taken by the Briggs method of summing up a film: "Two breasts. One beast. Three gallons blood. Heads roll. Two and a half stars. Joe Bob says check it out."

The next thing was to rent all the movies mentioned in "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In," a process that took years and involved many unfortunate detours. I have now seen hundreds of low-budget films, and most of them are in fact quite awful in every way.

But some are so dreadful they transcend their limitations and become extremely peculiar works of note - in particular a group of films made in the 1980s and early 1990s, before digitized special effects ruined movies with the video-game kung fu moves and the "Oh cool, the whole room is moving around again" Crouching Matrix shtook.

I am talking about films such as Basket Case, The Evil Dead, and Frankenhooker. These movies are disgusting, full of prurient interest, and have no redeeming social value whatsoever. They are also funny and well-crafted.

And there are more of these than you'd think. My researches took me to the works of Ed Wood, which are uniformly hard to take without serious chemical stimulation, and then to the catalog of another Grade Z master, Herschell Gordon Lewis, who was much more capable than Wood. (See Lewis' The Wizard of Gore and 2,000 Maniacs!)

The "Aztec Mummy" series, three of them all featuring the same World's Longest Ancient Aztec Karaoke/Human Sacrifice scene (the fourth is the one with the lady wrestlers) are fabulously bizarre.

A video company called "Something Weird" puts out a fine line of two- and three-fers of forgotten exploitation fare, which is where I found (for example) the cross-eyed giant gorilla flick The Mighty Gorga paired with an Ed Wood-written sexploitation quickie, One Million AC/DC.

There have also been a handful of newer films that venture into the exploitation realm, most notably 2003's Bubba Ho-Tep and 2004's zombie send-up Shaun of the Dead: good schlock with a bit of a budget that makes the schlock less, well, schlocky.

And the idiotic Borat movie really is pure exploitation - of everyone involved, from the drunk college kids who are suing to people like me who plunked down their eight smackers and sat through that nekkid wrestling scene.

I just watched a restored version of Fritz Lang's M, a film that was banned, denounced and almost ruined the careers of the director and of star Peter Lorre, who had to go, first to England and then to Hollywood to escape the thing (and the Nazis).

At the time, M was pure schlock, and not seen as even remotely amusing. (Of course, life in Germany in 1931 wasn't a barrel of laughs, generally speaking.) Today, it's a classic film, and takes some subtle digs at cops, bureaucracy, and mob mentality in addition to being the first example of the "serial killer terrifies city and is caught with some fancy forensic work" scenario seen almost every night on "Law & Order" or "CSI" reruns.

So will Zombie Lake be the star attraction of a scholarly retrospective in 20 years? Probably not - but it's nice to think about it.