MartialHorror discusses his thoughts on his review of “The Cinema Snob Movie”. Try not to fall asleep during class, my children.

I did forget to mention that I should’ve labelled the episode “Creepy Bald Guy reviews” over “Critiquing the Critics”, but…..yawn.

SCRIPT AND NOTES!

• Hello this is that Creepy Bald Guy and welcome to my review of The Cinema Snob movie, the most anticipated movie starring Brad Jones to come out on DVD in September.

 

As much as I enjoyed watching the reviewers- and 8-bit Mickey- get together and participate in the most epically homoerotic feature of all time, it was the Cinema Snob movie that was really tickling my pickle. The trailer alone made me squee like a little fangirl- sqee- I mean, it’s not just a comedy. But it’s a comedy with elements of exploitation and giallo- which is like an Italian blend of slasher and thriller?   awesome sauce.

 

Jake in a substantial role? Yay!

 

• I’m a huge fan of Jake. I even drew a picture of him and if you saw my last guidelines episode, you’d know that when MartialHorror puts pencil on paper, high art is born.

 

This is Jake going to the premiere of Smurf’s 2. Notice how his frown has abandoned the confines of his face. A true representation of what shall come to pass.

 

• Although it is sad that Jerrid doesn’t make an appearance. For those who don’t know, the backstory behind that is pretty awkward.

Apparently Jerrid was found, decapitated in a puddle of his own blood….and semen…and the perpetrator was never caught. Uh oh, me!? I knew I shouldn’t have drawn an exact replication of the crime scene. Oh well, time to flee to Space Mexico.

 

 

-Kay, I’m in Space Mexico now. What else can we expect?

 

We get the rest of Team Snob among other familiar faces, Irving yoinking his doinker and the arrival of another big reviewing personality, the cinema slob. Oh yeah, Spoony’s here too.

 

– But just as the Cinema Snob movie is ripe with possibilities, there’s always a chance that it too will be found, decapitated in a puddle of blood and semen. What are the downsides?

 

As much as I enjoy the Snob’s reviews, I just can’t picture the character sustaining a whole movie by himself. References and cynicism can only take you so far. It is obviously low budget, apparently being cheaper than the yearly TGWTG specials. But most of all, unlike those features, I had to spend money on it.

 

• But don’t fret. Whether I watch it for free or pay $20, I won’t any harsher on the movie. I might come to your house and reenact scenes of Cannibal Holocaust with you- James- but it wouldn’t effect my review.

 

Yet apparently Lloyd approves and that is worth 1,000 reviews. So is the movie good or bad?

 

• It’s great, easily being Brad’s best movie. I don’t know if that means anything, considering I haven’t seen any of his other films.

 

Brad plays Craig, a struggling screenwriter who’s trying to make a Blacksploitation film called Black Angus. But to accomplish this project he needs the backing of Dan Phillips- Played by Ryan, the director of the Cinema Snob movie. Dan is a pretentious film snob who’s dismissive of Craig because He looks down upon exploitation, while favoring artspoitation. When it becomes even more apparent they need Dan, Craig and the director of Black Angus- Neil, played by “I hope they make a Smurf’s 3 starring Adam Sandler just so he can review it” Jake- devise a plan where Craig dons the disguise of a Cinema Snob. He joins Dan’s film club and from there, everything goes to hell.

 

• He’s forced to participate in the analyization of Being John Malchovitch. Luckily, he gets a break when people start dying.

 

As the cast starts to dwindle, Brad teams up with the mysterious Nancy- played by Jillian- and they must find the killer or perish. Or worse, watch the Thin Red Line in Slow Motion. Now that’s terrifying.

 

• Apparently Brad shared my first concern about whether The Snob hold together a full length feature.

It can be argued that the Cinema Snob movie is a prequel to the webshow, or maybe it’s an alternate continuity but it’s pretty ambiguous and you don’t have to follow Brad’s works in order to understand what’s going on. It’s set up as a standalone film and has its own style of comedy. Yes, there are injokes for the fans, but it’s not driven by them.  SoWhat sort of comedic material do we get?

 

• Oh, where do we begin?

 

Let’s start with Brad, because he drives most of the jokes and is present in 98% of the film. He gets a lot to do and does it masterfully. I love how sophisticated his dialogue is, but it’s delivered in a way that makes it comical. He does a lot of acting with his face, which is especially hilarious when he’s trying- but not totally succeeding- at being a convincing film snob.

 

• It’s the characters reactions that keeps everything consistently amusing.

 

We aren’t laughing at how snobbish the film club is, we laugh at Craig’s fish-out-of-water attitude. We might snicker when we hear in gruesome detail what the killer did to his or her victims, but the groups nonchalant attitute towards this mayhem makes it funny. Then Craig’s horrified responses to both of those make these gags all the more golden.

 

Brad, Ryan and the crew have plenty of other funny tricks up their sleeves. The premises and titles Craig is able to dream up are hilarious and I love how Black Angus morphs into a running gag. There’s a lot of side splitting misdirection and the dialogue was catchy and memorable. The filmmakers always found ways to make me laugh and the jokes never became stale. They do occasionally poke fun at how absurd the situation is or toy with meta humor, but not to the extent where it starts knocking down the wall. It’s a silly movie, but it never becomes too farfetched. There are a fair amount of references in typical Brad fashion, but it’s just treated as a character quirk and nothing more.

 

– You may have noticed that I haven’t been showing a lot of clips, this is because whereas To Boldly Flee is very rapid fire with its comedy, the Cinema Snob Movie relies much more on context. Doug Walker’s films just set up the joke, then give a pay-off in the same scene. But to understand the jokes here you’d likely need to know the proceeding scene and I don’t want that much. Another reason is there’s a certain level of unpredictability to the humor and I don’t want to ruin any surprises.

 

Moving past the comedy, there are also some surprisingly sweet and thoughtful moments, such as when Craig says you shouldn’t put too much faith in the critics opinions unless they’re named MartialHorror.

 

• Hey, I didn’t write the film.

 

And once again, Brad does incredibly well in these more dramatic sequences. There’s only one more thing I want to say about his acting. we can actually see how stressed out Craig is becoming as the situation becomes more dangerous, and that is very difficult to pull off.  If its not Brad’s best performance, then it’s at least his…fullest performance, considering all the material he gets to work with

 

• The direction isn’t as easy to pin down.

 

It’s very…point and shoot, which ironically is the complete opposite of how giallo’s were directed. But at the same time, that is how exploitation filmmakers worked. Giallo’s are usually flashy and experimental when it came to camerawork and lighting, but I’m glad they didn’t go that route because it might’ve been too distracting. It is still a comedy and that kind of direction would’ve taken away from the jokes, plus, as I said, it fits the exploitation theme. Ryan does seem to be having fun with the lighting though. It seems like It’s actually fairly moody. Every once in awhile they’ll light a scene this blueish color that’s just..wierd looking. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t.

 

• Now the thriller angle doesn’t really come into play until around the 50 minute mark.

 

The stalk scenes aren’t very suspensful, but the pay-offs are pretty cool. I expected the kills to be average, like the one we see in the trailer, which is the first death.

 

• But as the bodies pile, the make-up effects become more ambitious and I was surprised how grisly the on-screen attacks were. There’s also nudity, which I really wasn’t expecting.

 

So props to the crew for going all out with the exploitation elements. It made the experience that much more impressive. The tension becomes edgier as we get closer and closer to the finale, but it never betrays the  comedic tone of the first half. It’s always a comedy, it’s just darker than it was before.  There’s nothing especially shocking about the twist. In fact, I’d be surprised if you don’t figure out who the killer is.

 

• I thought it was Lord Kat, which in retrospect was a bad choice considering he’s not even in the movie.

 

But all that does is make The film less like Deep Red and more like Blood and Black Lace, where it’s the journey that matters. Not the reveal. So I liked how it was written and directed, let’s move on to the supporting cast. While Brad might get the best moments, everyone has their time to shine.

 

Jillian surprised me because this type of character is usually the weakest link in these kinds of movies. But she has an entertaining personality and lots of charisma. They definitely went out of their way to make her a real character, not just the tacked on love interest. The love story works because they have chemistry and are not trying to force anything down our throats. Jillian held her own against Brad very well.

 

Spoony doesn’t have that big of a role, but his performance freaked me the fuck out. When I think of Spoony, I think of his insane hamminess and over-the-top gestures, which are entertaining.. But he’s shockingly retrained and comes across as a normal person

 

• I follow Spoony on twitter and I refuse to believe that there anything normal about him.

 

I shouldn’t even be calling him Spoony. This is Noah playing an independent character, not Spoony, so good job. Irving shows up to jack his wacker, clearly a metaphor for the symbolism present in modern day cinema. Ryan’s delivery is pretty stiff, but he fits really well in the context of the role and has a few exceptional moments where he’s just perfect. I like how the movie isn’t unfair for these kinds of film snobs. It just acknowledges them as being the other side of the same coin and their contempt for exploitation isn’t any different than Craig’s contempt for arthouse. The message seems to be “we have different tastes, but that’s okay, as long as we all hate those chipmunks”.

 

But the best performance from a person named Jake to appear in a Cinema Snob movie being reviewed by MartialHorror goes to……Sarah.

• Wait, what?! I mean, she does fine but what about Jake?

 

He seems awfully happy and considering I presume he wears a permenant scowl in reality, I can safely say that this is the best performance in anything ever made since the don of man. It should be noted that most of these actors aren’t really actors. They’re Brad’s friends, so expect some off moments, but I thought everyone had to bring something to the table. Whether it’s Ed Glaser, the man who makes bad acting awesome, playing a total creeper or Zachary the Cinema Slob, who’s effective as the edgy cop, or Orlando who seems intent on playing wildly different characters each time I see him. I didn’t feel there was a real weak link among them.

 

• So…any criticisms?

You could argue that it’s too long, has too many unecessary subplots – or characters- but being as how these superfluous scenes or people tended to crack me up in some way, shape or form, I personally didn’t mind. I thought the score was underwhelming. Some tracks work really well, but it seems like they were over-used. Skitch did better work, in my opinion, on the anniversaries.

• I would totally illegally download that music. But would I illegally download the track for the Cinema Snob movie? Probably not.

The audio was probably the worst aspect of the movie. My hearing is pretty sucky, so I’d turn the volume up pretty high. Then suddenly the audio would become too loud, so I’d lower it and the process would continue. It was a constant battle with my remote that ended in violence. Sometimes the accoustics in the locations would be off, you’d hear a lot of static or they’d pick up unnaturally loud noises and sometimes it was perfectly fine.

• Is it fair to criticize this considering what money they had to work with? That’s up to you.

But as a whole, I glomp the Cinema Snob movie. I love how it was written, acted and directed. It made me laugh, but also could be fairly intense. I’d rate it an 8.89315782h64 and a half.1/10

 

• It was funny, had violence, nudity and irving jerking off, which happens to be the four things I look for in quality film.

So watching it goes without the question, but would I buy it?

 

• Yeah, I think it’s worth the money. I’ll probably watch it again and can’t wait to check out the commentaries. So my name is MartialHorror and no, I am not a snobbish. I am an imaginary critic. There is a different.

 

Ryan has this uncanny ability to look like he’s reading from a teleprompter, when he apparently isn’t…

 

• You probably should remember that these are friends of Brad, not professionally trained actors so some of the dialogue delivery is pretty stiff. But that’s exploitation and comic timing is what really matters in a project like this,

 

His best moments come from when it looks like he’s going to catch on to Craig’s desiguise, but then doesn’t. His John Malchovitch speech was pretty impressive and one thing I did like is how the movie isn’t unfair to these kinds of film snobs. It just acknowledges them as being the other side of the same coin and their contempt for exploitation isn’t any different than Craig’s contempt for arthouse. The message seems to be “we have different tastes, but that’s okay, as long as we all hate those chipmunks”

 

I didn’t care for Orlando at first, but he grew on me and I loved how he was used. I’ve seen him in 5 different projects now and he’s played a very different character each time, so the man has range.

 

 

 

The first laughs in the entire movie come from his insanely awesome movie ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But apparently Lloyd approves and that is worth 1,000 reviewers.

 

 

-Hello this is that creepy bald guy and we’re about to review the Cinema Snob movie.

 

Space mexico.

 

Who wasn’t thrilled to hear about a full length feature film starring everyones favorite exploitation reviewer, Moronic Mark. But since he isn’t doing a film, we get the Cinema Snob Movie. Found the outset, it was easy to get excited as

 

I said that Brad was the best actor in To Boldly Flee, but his performance in The Cinema Snob Movie makes that seem wooden and uninspired in comparison. This is his ‘fullest’ acting.

 

Ripe with possibilities.

 

Best

 

Fullest performance from brad, giving great reactions and facial expressions.

 

Pointless divergances

 

direction is point and shoot, not of giallo, which benefited the story.

 

I am an imaginary critic.

 

Dramatic scene: Dont listen to critics unless they call themselves MartialHorror.

 

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Check out the Snob’s website: http://www.thecinemasnob.com