The Human Centipoop

Anticipation can be dangerous; it's easy to get your hopes up. When I saw the trailer for The Human Centipede, I had a feeling similar to anticipation... dread is something closer to what I felt.

The Human Centipede: First Sequence is about a depressed, formerly successful, German, surgeon who has decided to pursue his aspirations to sew living things together mouth-to-butt. He previously experimented with three rottweilers, but has decided to move on to humans. Unfortunately, we only get to see an out of focus picture of the Drei hund (three dog, in German). I reeeally wish we could have seen them in action, walkin' around, gettin' the paper, chasin' their tail, but I'm sure animal rights groups would have given the director a lot of trouble. I'm glad human rights groups just stayed out of this.

The movie also stars two typically-annoying-easily-hate-able young women who make one wrong turn after another until they are trapped in a basement about to be sewn together.
Wrong turns include...
1) Leaving the country. These girls turn out to be complete morons and never should have set foot outside of (what can only be assumed to be) a midwestern college campus.
2) Walking through the forest after their car breaks down. When I get a flat tire the FIRST thing I do is walk straight into the woods... to truly get myself acclimated.
3) Entering the isolated home they stumble upon during their woodland stroll - after being greeted by a strange, sinewy German man who looks like he is about to eat them (lucky for us, it's much more interesting than simple cannibalism).
4) Drinking the water. As I mentioned before it can only be assumed that these two girls are midwestern American college students. So, they MUST have been lectured endlessly about not letting people serve you drinks because of the drugs they will put in them. Of course, the strange, sinewy German man roofies them, then tells them he has done so, almost as a PSA to all who are watching... It's not just for frat parties anymore. You could end up sewn to someone's butt.
5) Trying to escape. Well, just one of them tries to escape, fails (of course) and after being recaptured, is rewarded by being deemed center position in the 'pede.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS:

- Instructions are given on how to create your own human centipede! The doctor describes AT LENGTH which flaps of skin will be cut and sewn where. I'm glad they really thought this through. It's not like some crazy idea that you sit there thinking "Yeah, but HOW?!"
- The leader of the 'pede is a Japanese man (WAIT- JAPANESE MAN? What was an Asian person doing in Germany?! I know, I was shocked, too) the doc kidnaps after he feels the fat ass truck driver he initially captured, won't be agile enough to crawl around with people sewn to his butt (I'm not sure why he wasted his time with this first victim... i guess he was rushing into things without thinking).
- People eat poop. It's like that thing Hitchcock said ... "A bomb under a table goes off, and that's surprise. We know the bomb is under the table but not when it will go off, and that's suspense." The doctor never says, "Yer gonna poop in each others' mouths" but, like, you know that this Asian dude is gonna have to poop in this girl's mouth, you just don't know when... then he does.
- Boobs. The girls in the centipede are topless. This makes it slightly more disturbing... which honestly I didn't think was possible. Maybe because of my own acting aspirations I thought over and over again of these actors telling friends and family about the new film they got cast in. "Well, grandma, I'm mostly naked for half of the movie... and I'm sewn to someone's butt-hole."

-WARNING WARNING... THIS IS HOW THE MOVIE ENDS... DO YOU REEEEALLY WANT TO KNOW, OR DON'T YOU WANT TO FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF?



THE ENDING: After the Japanese leader of the 'pede gives an out-of-place epic monologue about his shameful life and God's punishment, he kills himself. Then the caboose girl dies of infection... So little miss runaway is sewn to two dead people in the middle a house, in the middle of the forest, in the middle of Germany. Gooooooood luck, sister. I hope the sequel is about her dealing with fame and fortune after she was discovered/rescued/separated and has to cope with her family and friends treating her differently.

CBS Poop Show

This is a personal poop on CBS.

I am in a show this summer in The New York International Fringe Festival. While some shows in the festival have huge budgets and giant teams of producers and designers, we have had to delay paying some bills so we could fund the show and asked friends to work for free. The play follows three young men who hit and kill a deer on the way home from the funeral of a friend. So, we needed a dead deer. A talented young artist, Dylan VanDenHoeck, built one for us out of burlap and chicken wire. No deer were harmed in the making of this show.

The Fringe has had several opportunities for us to promote our shows. We went to the opening night party with the deer in tow. We danced on a table with her! A photographer from The New York Times took several shots of us and took our names! We crossed our fingers, hoping to see the picture in the paper the next day. Didn't happen. We did get one line in the article though.

Then we got word from the Fringe that The CBS Early show had invited 100 Fringe Festival Participants to stand out in the plaza and get some time on the air. They said they'd be talking to us and maybe even ask us to do some scenes. We jumped at the chance to promote the show. A couple of cast members stayed the night at my Manhattan apartment and at 7 a.m. we were eagerly awaiting our deer's television debut. Naturally we thought the deer would get some attention. It did. Cameras panned the crowd and we did our best to get the deer in every shot we could. We were thoroughly ignored by the TV personalities, but no one said anything about the deer being inappropriate. Eventually, David Price (CBS Early Show weatherman whose name I never knew until today) was the first to denounce the deer, telling us "We're not going to talk to you!" and security guards told us that if we put it on camera one more time they'd ask us to leave, which was nice of them. So we got it on camera... and they asked us to leave. We were escorted off the premises with our deer wrapped in a tarp. See it happen here...

So I would like to take a personal poop on CBS for the following reasons...

-Two and a Half Men is still on the air

-They invited a bunch of THEATER PEOPLE onto a morning show without screening us or making a list of rules that clearly needed to be in place BEFORE we thought we'd be able to promote our shows on television. (They're lucky the PORN ROCK - THE MUSICAL cast didn't show up.)

-It seemed that the invitation to the Fringe Festival participants was just a cheap way to make it look like people actually liked/wanted to be on the CBS Early Show. Apparently they made no mention that all of these wacky people in costume out on the plaza were from the festival, but waited until the show was almost over to confess where the crowd came from.

[NOTE: This poop on CBS is not intended to get on Andy Rooney.]

UPDATE!!!

We made it into a segment! This was right before we got escorted off the premises.

Poopy... I mean Gooby

I discovered Gooby several months ago. I watch all the movie trailers Apple posts and was terrified by this particular one. It claimed to be a family film, but the frightening title character seemed like the kind of thing I was most afraid of as a child; Gooby is a giant bear, he has fangs and claws, and he's foreign.

Willy is an imaginative (schizophrenic?) eleven-year-old who is neglected by his career oriented parents. At many points in this movie I wondered why these people had a child because they clearly hate everything about him and usually treat him like a nuisance. They move into a new bigger house and Willy worries this will bring strange, new, frightening hallucinations. His useless parents hire a wrinkly British nanny to watch him afterschool, but she doesn't play a huge role and is usually just in scenes where she is sleeping in the living room while antics ensue in the background. Willy had left behind an old teddy bear of his at his old house which magically is electrified to life (great special effects) to grow into the 8 feet of terror that will soon haunt Willy's daily life. Gooby shows up and scares the crap out of Willy. The two become fast friends and seal their friendship with a hotdog fight and farting contest. Willy sets him up a sweet hideout in the shed in his backyard. Eugene Levy (WHY ARE YOU IN THIS MOVIE?!) emerges as a new teacher at Willy's school. I expected him to be the villain, but really just turns out to be suffering from severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is displayed when he opens his briefcase in one scene and a cleanly creased stack of paper napkins are revealed as the only thing inside. There is a GREAT chase scene in a grocery store where Eugene is chasing the two around with a camera and the following things happen: Gooby tears the shit out of the cereal section, Willy has a fantastic green screen shot of him being pulled through the air by his bear counterpart, and the guy wearing the Gooby suit clearly can't handle the supermarket tiling and falls (this DEFINITELY was NOT choreographed to happen). I was really confused a lot during this movie because the storyline didn't seem to exist beyond Willy and Gooby having a rocky love/hate relationship. In the end Gooby gets Willy's parents to give a shit about him by taking him into the woods and hiding in what seems to be an abandoned crack den.

Why Gooby should NOT be trusted around children:

-he builds Willy a go cart so he can get him to sit on his "comfy" lap

-he takes Willy and some of his friends to see an R rated movie

-he could easily just be some guy in a bear costume who hides in a shed in a little boy's backyard

The Grim Pooper

Celebrity death has filled our days this week with the loss of Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays. The Poop Review would like to poop on death a little. To take them one right after another is just not right. Poop on you death. Hopefully Ed, Farah, Michael and Billy are all together now at some sort of awkward dead celebrity cocktail party in the sky.

Poop on Board

About a month ago, I was perusing the latest movie trailers when I came across Baby on Board, which appeared to be a typical romantic comedy about a woman with a sturdy career getting pregnant. The trailer, however, seems to have been edited by the intern who started yesterday and resorted to using the "car tires screeching" sound effect. It ends with Heather Graham farting in a board meeting. I was confused. I didn't expect to hear about this movie ever again.

Falling asleep is usually pretty difficult for me, so I've turned to Netflix Watch Instantly. I usually go to an episode of The Office. Yesterday I finished watching the Fun Run episode and easily fell asleep. Tonight I wanted something different, so I went to see what new movies were available to watch instantly. I scrolled down the page...

...and there it was... like a big, fresh, stinky poop sitting on the sidewalk. The kind that makes you wonder HOW this thing got here. Baby on Board, like the big poop, stopped me in my tracks, wanting to see if I'd just imagined it. I took a second look to find that YES it was real. Now usually I'd leave a poop alone at this point, but I had to know more. I wanted to see if A) the trailer was not a true representation of the film and was just REALLY poorly put together and B) while a stupidly typical premise, if the production quality was at all good. The answer: no and no. The trailer perfectly paints what the viewer will get to see, only the film provides a couple of boobs and LOTS more fake erect penises. The movie starts with an annoying Natasha Beddingfield song about having babies and really crappy digital animation of storks flying through weird anime looking skies while carrying swaddled babies in their beaks. One stork makes a seagull noise and the babies begin to float to earth. While the credits roll, babies parachute to the ground and we fade into live action. The fart scene (in trailer) pretty much starts off the movie, so I was concerned that the excitement would end there. Boy was I wrong... Heather Graham is a high-powered business woman who apparently works in a huge office building with only two people: Raphy, her poorly acted, very typically gay assistant and Lara Flynn Boyle (seriously though, you barely see ANYONE else in the building... I don't think they could afford the extras). Heather Graham is working on selling a perfume for expectant mothers (whoa, you will NEVER guess WHO gets pregnant)... Lara Flynn Boyle gives a speech about women in the work force being hindered by starting families... blah blah blah... we all see where this is going. Jerry O'Connell is a high-powered attorney (there is a lot of power in this marriage) who helps sleazy people get out of pre-nup agreements and keep their dirty money. Heather and Jerry have the perfect marriage. But uh-oh, John Corbett is Jerry O'Connell's sleazy friend who drinks, gets handjobs at a Korean massage parlor and hates his wife. I don't want to get too in depth with a scene by scene breakdown, so here are some highlights...

OBSERVATIONS & HIGHLIGHTS from Brian Herzlinger's new film Baby on Board
1. Most of this movie was shot out of focus.
2. Lara Flynn Boyle looks terrifying. She has jowls, which led me to believe she was supposed to be pregnant, but I think it was just some bad plastic surgery. She also awkwardly cries later in the film after the (SPOILER ALERT) baby is born.
3. There is a scene where John Corbett's wife catches him masturbating. The scene starts with him in the dark, just the sounds lending the imagination a hand. The lights come on and we see his underwear pulled down exposing his bare buttocks while he violently works on himself. The scene goes on, the wife tells him to leave, he says no, she walks out, he stands up... and THERE is the first fake erect penis seen in this film.
4. Someone sucks on Jerry O'Connell's thumb.
5. It made me sad that they couldn't afford to give ANY lines to one of the strippers John Corbett hires. She is silent, but not just like "I'm a stripper and basically scenery" silent. There are moments when you think she's about to speak, but doesn't... because then they'd have to pay her more.
6. John Corbett brings his wife (I don't know who she is) to the Korean massage parlor where he gets his handjobs. He does it in order to stop Jerry O'Connell from going through with a revenge handjob. They are greeted by the typically-Asian madame, who asks where he's been and if he has a "pee-pee disease", but John Corbett breaks into the parlor to find Jerry O'Connell. John Corbett gives this powerful speech about being true to your wife and how important that is. As the two men walk down the hall to leave, they are greeted by many of the middle-aged men who were so moved by John Corbett's speech and have left their massage tables. They shower John Corbett with applause and high fives as he walks down the hallway... their fake erect penises blocking the way. Finally the two men have to push through the toweled, fake erect penises to freedom. The scene at the parlor ends with a totally naked man coming into the hall with anal beads hanging out of his... anus.
7. The baby that Heather Graham gives birth to looks about a month old... her poor vagina. Seriously, this baby is HUGE.
8. There are also just a lot of plot holes and poorly shot/edited scenes, so you never really understand where people are standing in relationship to one another in a room.
9. Heather Graham throws up on someone and it looks like Elmer's glue.
10. There is a blooper reel that plays with the credits. John Corbett just says "balls" a lot and "Scare-ya" Flynn Boyle swears repeatedly then flips off the director.

If I were on the ratings board (haha, Baby on Board...) I'd rate this movie R for gratuitous erect penises, bad plastic surgery and generally bad acting.

I honestly didn't think I would make it to the end, but it just kept getting worse and worse and I really thought it might have some sort of saving grace or justification... which it did not. I really think this is a movie you have to see to believe. Maybe I'll just put together some clips to save you from the scene in the men's locker room where Jerry O'Connell and John Corbett see a man with balls that hang to his knees.

There is a lot of poop out there. Sometimes it gets neglected. We'll watch/listen/visit/read it and let you know just how poopy it is.

This blog should not be confused with PoopReport.com, which deals with actual poop.