My boss at the comic shop went away on two back to back trips this summer, which led to me logging in a lot of time at the old shop. Mostly that's not so bad, the comic shop is a good place to hang out, especially if you're getting paid to be there. But we at Strange Adventures Fredericton are open late Thursday and Friday, for your comic book purchasing convenience. Normally the boss and I would split these days, but for these two weeks I was all by my lonesome. Eleven hours on Thursday, eleven hours on Friday, and then eight hours on Saturday. That basically leaves me with enough time to go home and fall asleep before I've gotta return to the comic store. It also leads to craziness.

I figured I could help combat this craziness by renting a bunch of movies. So I went to Jumbo and took advantage of their low low rates on old flicks. I grabbed a few respectable films, but then I walked past Crossroads. The Britney Spears movie. "How bad could it be?" I wondered. And as I stared at that tape case, I swear I couldn't look away. I gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into me, and as soon as I felt it in my grasp I knew that I was done for. Because you can't just rent one bad movie. You have to rent lots.

So here begins my descent into horrorbleness, and also some of my more embarrassing trips to Jumbo. They never say anything when you rent shitty movies, but you know they're thinking it.

Now this one was super embarrassing, due to the obvious assumption that any grown man renting it is a pedophile. That's understandable, since I can't figure out any other reason a grown man would rent it. I've gotta admit that I was curious about the hype, and the hype about Holiday In The Sun was wacky indeed.

I once found a website where a randy fellow rated the Olsen Twin films on how well you can masturbate to them. I sincerely wish I had bookmarked it, because I've never been able to find it again, and it was truly a brilliant piece of craziness. All I remember from what I read was that Getting There was some kind of cock-tease letdown, while Holiday In The Sun contained an "insane amount of skin". It's a wicked world we live in, folks. But if I was gonna rent an Olsen Twins movie then dammit, I was gonna get the best. I was gonna be blinded by underage flesh.

Now this guy with the website, he's not on my list of people I wanna meet someday. I admit that the Olsens are getting pretty hot, but that's because they're seventeen. In Holiday In The Sun, they are not seventeen. They're more like fourteen, and while they no longer look like Cabbage Patch Kids as they did in their youth, they're still a ways from being sexy. So while they did spend short amounts of the film in fairly small bikinis, I'm glad to say I did not feel the urge to pull down my pants and masturbate in the store. Thank god for that, because I was honestly a little bit worried that I'd be indoctrinated into a terrifying underworld of barely-pubescent Olsen Twin fetishizing. Luckily, it turns out that that guy on the internet was not indicative of the average man. Those few years between then and now make a lotta difference. When I go up to heaven I can face Saint Peter with a clean Olsen Twin conscience, proudly admitting that I only lusted after them when they were one year too young and not four. Heaven sounds like a pretty swinging place. I'm sure they'll let it go.

And with that moral crisis out of the way, I leaned against the counter and played with my hair while I enjoyed the movie.

In the comic Finder by Carla Speed McNeil, she at one point makes reference to children's books written for those with low-to-average IQs, in which the protagonists do little besides eat and talk. This was one of those. The girls were always talking about boys, there was very little plot, and 30% of the movie was taken up by musical montages of the girls riding on boats or playing with dolphins.

All the guys seemed a lot older than the twins, and one guy was almost twice as tall as whichever Olsen he was with. The top of her head barely came up to his collarbone, and I know girls are short, but he was like a creepy giant putting the moves on a little kid. He said he'd had a crush on her "for the longest time", but if he went back more than five or six years she wouldn't even have been born! It was weird.

A quick aside: An employee at Blockbuster was telling me one time about how jealous he was of the Olsens. "Look at this, they get to go to the Bahamas, they get to swim by a coral reef, they get to visit a volcano. I never got to visit a volcano!" I agreed. That was some bullshit.

Right at the end of the movie one of the 10 foot tall guys got arrested for suspected smuggling, and that last 5% of the film dragged on for ten thousand hours. They cleared his name and caught the smugglers, just like I assume they used to do when they dressed up as detectives, and everybody was happy. Musical montage of happiness.

Stefan actually came into the shop halfway through this movie and I recommended that he stick around, so we could do a dual review. He said he wasn't going to do that because he was "sane." I really couldn't argue with that.

On to the heathen that begat all this torment. The second scene of this movie involved Britney dancing around her room in her bra and panties, and I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and actually rewound it in order to enjoy it again. I was thinking this Crossroads thing might be okay until Dan Akroyd told Britney to get ready for her graduation, because she was giving the valedictorian speech. Oh, man.

I lost track of the movie for a bit while I was ringing up a customer, but when I next looked up she was in her bra and panties again. I won't lie, at this point I was loving this movie. Hey, did you know that Britney gave it up to Justin when she was 19? Haha, slut...

Then the movie got real boring. I was nodding off, until something very unusual happened. The three girls on their road trip of discovery discovered that they had a cracked radiator. It would cost $350 plus labor to fix. How oh how would these three sexy girlies get that kind of money in only one day?

I'll tell you how: "Karaoke Contest". What? What the hell is that? They're not gonna strip? They're not even gonna enter a wet t-shirt contest or something? Come on, give me something! But then it started to occur to me that this movie is more sly than I realized. Being aimed at 13 year old girls, there's no way they could show the girls actually stripping. What they did instead was to make it clear to the adults in the audience that what transpired on screen was only a metaphor for what really happened to those characters.

Every sign for the karaoke contest was in quotation marks. "Karaoke Contest". A lot of people improperly use those inverted commas to accentuate a word, but that's not what they're for. They're used when quoting speech, but also to denote falseness. For instance, say I write that Holiday In The Sun was "awesome". That doesn't mean it was awesome. That means that it wasn't awesome. It means I was being sarcastic, or maybe just lying to you. In the case of Crossroads, "Karaoke Contest" means "This is not a Karaoke Contest".

Further supporting this theory is the fact that the karaoke contest takes place in a strip club. There are stripper poles and everything. So while Britney (dressed as a hyper-slut) sings and gyrates around while slobbering men stuff her "tip jar" with money, the 13 year old girls in the audience wear trusting smiles while the adults narrow an eye and say, "Ahhh... I see what's going on here..." Long story short, those girls sucked enough dick to win some kind of dick sucking contest, but in a fun, "discovering themselves" kind of way, then got their radiator fixed and continued on their wholesome journey. It's like Shakespeare, man. Layers.

Really, the movie wasn't as bad as people say. It actually had some nice moments, and with a rewrite I thought it could have been downright okay. That is until the Maelstrom Of Resolution smashed into the climax of the film, destroying everything in its path. It turns out that the guy who had raped and impregnated Britney's friend #1 was also the fiancé of Britney's friend #2, despite the two friends having been completely estranged at the time the rape took place. Now what are the chances of that? Much like Britney being valedictorian, I found it impossible to suspending disbelief, and as a wrestling fan I've gotten a lotta practice suspending disbelief. I can buy that a stack of paper plates can critically injure a man, but I couldn't buy the end of this flick.

Friend #1 is then so shocked by the insane unlikelyhood of this development that she falls down the stairs and has a miscarriage. Man. I love it when movies fuck me gently with a chainsaw.

There's a lotta risk in renting old movies that you used to like. Will they still be great, like Back to the Future and Labyrinth? Or will they suck, like all the others?

At first Flight of the Navigator was great. It only took ten minutes for the kid to time warp into the future, and once he did people started freaking out, saying stuff like "No, no! This must be some kinda crazy gag!" I also enjoyed the appearance by the kid's now-grown-up little brother, who had become the raddest guy 1986 had ever seen. He walked in with his sunglasses and gelled hair and said "Awesome! Awesome to the max! Hey, remember when I wasn't cool? Wow, that sure was a long time ago! Wicked! Hey, thumbs up! I'll catch you later, skater!" That guy was great.

Did you know that in the eighties, some people called their remote a "remote control wand"? That's pretty cool.

I first started to realize that something was wrong with this movie when the ship that the kid flies around in began replying by saying "compliance!" in the gayest way possible. Also, this really annoying customer came in, and while me and my friends Brad and Wender were laughing mockingly at dumb crap, this guy was really laughing. All men are created equal my dick.

The movie completely self-destructed when the ship downloaded the kid's memories and got the kid's untamed personality with it, and though he isn't credited under his given name, it became obvious that the ship was voiced by Pee Wee Herman. Things just got stupider and stupider, and I know kids are dumb and don't realize when something sucks, but I still don't understand how adults can make shit like this. Don't they know that these kids are gonna grow up some day, rent their old favorites and then want to kill themselves?

But there was one awesome part of this movie: R.A.L.F., the Rolling Automated Life Friend. I actually don't remember what R.A.L.F. stood for, but it was basically this giant, rolling sandwich machine that went from room to room in the secret government base. It was so big that the main kid could easily fit inside and travel all over the base. Even in the most high security areas the guards would just say, "Hey, sandwiches! Nuts, it's not stopping! Oh well, I'll get it on the next pass!" Then they'd start whistling to themselves, real loud.

I'd never heard of this movie, but it had a lotta names in it, so I grabbed it. Then my friend Matt swung by the comic shop and said "200 Cigarettes, huh? I heard that sucked." Just the reassurance I was looking for.

B. Flek's in it though, and I love that guy. I don't watch most of his movies, but he's a great dude. On the commentary tracks for Chasing Amy and Dogma he and Kevin Smith are hilarious. Also, he excelled in his portrayal of that guy in Phantoms.

Unfortunately, Matt was right. This movie sucks. Take Kate Hudson, for instance. I've never seen her play a likeable character. All she does is smile and look dumb. Penny Lane my ass.

But enough of the negatives! This review will focus only on the positives!

Haha! Man, I wish I'd written that.

In one scene B. Flek, a bartender, drops a glass, but keeps right on going as though he hadn't dropped it. That cracked me up.

Christina Ricci has some really great tits. Really great.

And that about covers it.

Right from the start, this movie was not as good as Bikini Summer 2. The opening had a mere one pair of naked tits, and at least a dozen wedgied man-ass shots. A lot of the chicks were also not very hot. I started to immediately question why this movie was even made. Surely not for the plot. Maybe for the witty banter. Of which there was none.

Firstly, it takes forever to get to the beach, and when they do the beach is in Australia. Now I've got nothing against Australia, just australians themselves, and the way they talk. It's damn silly. The scottish, fine accents. The irish, dat's da ting. An hour and a half of australian surfer-slang, that's rough. Rough like a punch to the nuts.

The whole plot is that an american jerk wants to develop an australian beach into a resort, but the beach dwellers eventually teach him the true meaning of christmas. Or I assume they do, because I didn't make it to the end. Several times I came close to stopping the film, but each time I resisted until finally, at about 70% completion, I could take the inanity no more. So I never did find out how the dirty hippies saved their crappy beach.

After that last atrocity, I had to go for a sure thing. What makes this a sure thing? Well I got two words for ya: Corey Feldman! Be it Friday The 13th Part 4, Stand By Me or Rock 'n Roll High School Forever, you can't go wrong with Corey Feldman. Feldman is the coolest guy. I always though him and Corin Nemec deserved more play, maybe in a movie where they fight each other to the death. I'd watch some of that.

The shocking thing is that even Corey Haim is sorta cool in this movie. Way cooler than in License To Drive. Actually, ten minutes into this movie I was liking it. It was sorta wacky and funny and didn't make much sense, but in a good way.

Then the plot came bursting in, and things got bad. But while everything else in the movie was terrible, Feldman and Haim had this really good improve-style back-and-forth going. I don't know if they were supposed to sound like they were improvising or they just forgot their lines, but it cracked me up.

Bwahaha! I don't understand why they gave the characters names, though. They shoulda just been Feldman and Haim. Never Haim and Feldman. Always Feldman and Haim.

So while Feldman and Haim continued to entertain, the rest of the movie blew. All the adults were total squares, but at one point somebody said, "Watch out for snakes!", and that's gotta be worth something.

The main guy in this movie is 2 1/2 feet tall. He's a nerd who all the jocks hate until they need grades, which he helps them get and they love him. Then he helps one of the jocks get a smart chick by writing him these "intelligent" lines which sicken even me. They sound like lines a stupid person would write into a movie script when they're trying to mimic the things they've heard smart people say, which is what they are. The movie gets all heavy and it's really embarrassing. Earnestness and this movie mix like midgets and respectability, in that they don't. And seriously, how am I supposed to feel sympathy for this short, tiny man?

Anyway, it all leads to a grand finale where the smart chick realizes she actually loves the nerdy wimp dude, and she strides away playfully like a long-legged gazelle while our l'il hero is running, running, running after her like a constipated wiener dog.

The only actual point to this movie is the occasional nudity. Here's the rundown:

Two and a half minutes, most of it involving grotesque shortness. Rough.

*This scene is of particular note: A drunk prostitute who Jock hires as Nerd's double date partner starts stripping in the middle of a high priced meal and tries to paw at Nerd's piece, which truly is as long as his leg. Because he's short. He's very, very short.

I had a couple more movies to go: Porky's Revenge and Ready To Rumble. I actually started Ready to Rumble and man, I bet Lou Thesz was proud to be in that opening montage. But in the end it was not meant to be, because God made it clear that my sins against nature would no longer stand.

An old hot water pipe broke above the entryway to the comic shop, and the most putrid, stagnant, sulfer-smelling water starting pouring through the ceiling. It was impossible to walk into the store without gagging. Luckily this was on a slow Monday so it didn't interrupt business too much, but I had to attack that son of a bitch with thirty bucks worth of cleaning solution for most of the afternoon. On top of that the sink was screwed up and wouldn't drain, making the whole ordeal even worse.

In the end I was tired and reeking, and I'm sure that if I hadn't spent the previous two weeks watching shitty movies when I should have been working I would have been fine. It was God's way of slapping me to attention. I normally wouldn't even capitalize a word like "God", but I damn sure will in this case. He had it in for me. It was truly a horrible act of sudden cruelty. Sometimes, in my dreams, I can still taste the defeat. I was scrubbing for hours.

God, I hate you. I hate you so much.