We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
JEZEBEL’S KISS (1990)
Michael Gross went directly from finishing his work on the classic 1980s sitcom Family Ties to landing a role in the creature feature Tremors, launching a whole new era in his career, as he would go on to star in multiple Tremors sequels and a short-lived Tremors TV series. His on-screen wife Meredith Baxter, then known as Meredith Baxter Birney, wasn’t so lucky. She went directly from Family Ties to working on the largely forgotten erotic thriller Jezebel’s Kiss, which was so low-rent that they even misspelled her name in the opening title sequence.
Jezebel’s Kiss, which was written and directed by Harvey Keith, centers on the oddball characters that populate a small town on the California coast. The mayor, Benjamin J. Faberson (Malcolm McDowell), has big plans for a stretch of beach he owns – but his desire to build a tourist attraction and condominium on that spot of beach has been bogged down for fifteen years. Not only has he had to cut through a lot of red tape, but there was also an issue in the early days when an old man who lived on the beach refused to vacate his home. Faberson and some of the other locals – including bar owner Virginia (Baxter) and Sheriff Dan Riley (Everett McGill) – had to get together and bully the old guy until he dropped of a heart attack. Then, while he was being rushed to the hospital (where he was pronounced dead), they burnt his house to the ground. But now, finally, Faberson’s beach renewal project is moving forward.
Before the project can break ground, the town is shaken up by the arrival of a young woman named Jezebel (Katherine Barrese), who crashes her motorcycle at the edge of town and has to take a job at Virginia’s bar to earn enough money to repair her bike. During her time in town, Jezebel befriends Virginia’s sister Margie (Elizabeth Ruscio) and has sex with several of the local guys who start drooling as soon as they see her. First, she accepts a date with Sheriff Riley, who had been on and off with Viriginia for years until Jezebel got to town... and turns out to be the sort of scumbag who doesn’t pay attention to the word “No.” Things are consensual when she has sex with Faberson’s son Hunt (Brent David Fraser) – even though she warns him beforehand that it will never happen again, and he has trouble accepting that. Especially since Jezebel also has consensual sex with his father when the elder Faberson sneaks (poorly; his wife, played by Meg Foster, and Hunt both notice what he’s doing) into Jezebel’s room while she’s staying in their guest shack.
It’s obvious from early on that Jezebel is on a mission of revenge and is hoping to sabotage the beach renewal project, avenging the death of her grandfather... but all she does on this mission is have sex with a couple of guys and get assaulted by another. She holds weapons on a couple of occasions, but doesn’t use them. Whether or not her actions will have any impact on the beach renewal plans will depend entirely on how the men react to having her pass through their lives.
Despite having a great cast, Jezebel’s Kiss is not a very good movie, and only barely scrapes by as a “so bad it’s good” viewing option. The pace and storytelling are awkward and clunky, the characters behave in very strange ways, and there’s not much of a pay-off. When drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs showed this movie on his Movie Channel show back in the ‘90s, he gave it a perfect score of 4 stars, while also poking fun at it. I’m usually saying I enjoyed movies that Joe Bob called “turkeys” more than he did, but in this case, I would knock some stars off the Jezebel’s Kiss rating. This one doesn’t have much to offer – but it does deliver on the erotic thriller necessity of making sure Katherine Barrese gets naked in multiple scenes.
SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE (2023)
As I’ve mentioned before, it can be difficult for me to get into animation. I have to be in the right mood or I just will not be able to connect with it at all. So, when I hear about an animated project, I usually assume that it’s not going to be for more. But then, when I give things a chance, I can be won over – like I was with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Unfortunately, its sequel turned out to be one of those animated projects that didn’t work for me... and I’m wondering if maybe this one was jarring to me because I am now of “a certain age,” because I found most of this movie to be sensory overload. It’s 140 minutes, making it one of the longest animated movies ever made, and there’s so much fast-paced action and stuff splashing across the screen (with a different animation style for every dimension the characters enter) for so much of the running time, I was dizzy. And irritated.
Spider-Man / Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) thought he and his spider-friends had successfully saved the multiverse at the end of Into the Spider-Verse, but then Spider-Man 2099 / Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), Spider-Woman / Jess Drew (Issa Rae), and a whole task force packed with spider-people come along to tell him and his fellow heroes Spider-Woman / Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Spider-Man / Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) that they left the situation a mess, with villains randomly getting shot into the wrong dimensions, and the task force has to clean it up. After first, Miles is eager to join the task force, which also features such characters as Spider-Man India / Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) and Spider-Punk / Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya)... but then he finds out that Spider-Man 2099 is a cold, hard, strict bastard when it comes to making sure that each dimension sticks to its “canon events.” Which makes sense, since a universe can collapse if the canon events don’t occur... but when canon events are things like Miles’s dad, Jeff Morales (Brian Tyree Henry) being killed by interdimensional portal-creating scientist-turned-supervillain The Spot / Johnathon Ohnn (Jason Schwartzman), you can understand why Miles risks the wrath of the spider-people and the collapse of his own universe by trying to stop his dad from getting murdered.
I didn’t like the over-the-top action sequences. I found Miles’s interactions with the other spider-people as they discuss the fate of the multiverse to be dull. I didn’t enjoy the scenes involving The Spot. But there were moments in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse that I did like; especially the scenes where Miles deals with typical Spider-Man issues, like trying to be a superhero on the side while still living up to the expectations of his parents, Jeff and Rio (Lauren Vélez). I was left wishing this has just been a straightforward Spider-Man story about Miles fighting crime in Brooklyn instead of dealing with all of the multiverse craziness.
But that’s what this Spider-Verse series is all about. Across the Spider-Verse ends on a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse comes along. I hope the trilogy capper will be more my speed than this middle chapter was.
THE MONKEY (2025)
Osgood Perkins is known for directing intensely serious horror films, so it makes sense that, when production company Atomic Monster approached him with the idea of him taking the helm of the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, they handed him a very serious script. Then, likely to everyone’s surprise, Perkins decided that the proper way to approach the concept was with a smile and a sense of humor... and that’s how we got a version of The Monkey, a story that could have been brought to the screen in a dark and unsettling way, that’s goofy as hell as becomes more and more ridiculous as it goes along.
Completely rewritten by Perkins, who gets sole screenwriting credit, The Monkey centers on identical twins Hal and Bill Shelburn, whose father disappeared when they were young kids. Among their father’s belongings, they find a drum-playing toy monkey – and they soon realize that when the monkey bangs its drums, someone connected to it is going to die. Their babysitter, their mother, and their uncle are fall prey to the monkey before the boys decide to dump it into a well. Jump ahead twenty-five years and the monkey comes back into Hal’s life when his aunt dies in a freak accident. Now, Hal and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) have to figure out a way to get rid of the monkey for good.
I love the Final Destination movies, where characters get killed off in freak accidents that play out in sequences that come off like they were designed by Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist and inventor who had a knack for coming up with "complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways." So I thought I would get more enjoyment out of watching The Monkey, in which people are also taken out in Rube Goldbergian freak accident sequences... but Perkins went too far over-the-top with the deaths, as far as I’m concerned. For example: sure, I could go along with the idea that a woman gets electrocuted in a motel pool due to the collapse of a broken air conditioner, but I can’t go along with the idea that the electricity would cause her to explode into tiny pieces as soon as she touches the water.
Even though the short story source material is serious, I was fine with the idea of Perkins making the movie with a sense of humor. As it turns out, I just didn’t share his sense of humor, because he ended up making the movie too silly for my taste. Then things really go crazy and fall apart near the end. I had high hopes for The Monkey, but it didn't work for me.
YOU SEASON THREE (2021)
During the first season of the thriller series You, New York City bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) killed enough people to achieve serial killer status. The second season found Joe living in Los Angeles, on the run from his past and trying to improve himself, to overcome his homicidal tendencies. He killed a couple of people in that batch of episodes, but he also let a potential victim go after they spent some time in one of the plexiglass cages he likes to construct, and was planning to release another one. During that season, Joe also found love with chef / baker Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), the latest woman he believed could be “the one.” Then, he was disturbed to find that Love is also a serial killer... and he couldn’t kill her and flee town because she was pregnant with his child.
Based (apparently very loosely) on the Caroline Kepnes novel You Love Me, You season 3 finds Joe living in a place he considers to be even worse than L.A.; the Hell to L.A.’s Purgatory: suburbia. He and Love, who has given birth to their son Henry, have moved to a community called Madre Linda, and Joe is miserable. He hates living in Madre Linda, he hates that he’s stuck with a serial killer for a significant other... and his gaze is starting to drift to other women. This is another season where Joe claims to be trying to better himself, even though he still does a lot of highly questionable things. But it’s also another season where it seems he might be able to bottle his homicidal urges – if only circumstances were better.
People do end up dead, but it’s Love who tends to attack innocent victims, while, as in season 2, it’s more difficult to be upset with Joe’s choice of victims.
This is a highly entertaining season, and my second favorite of the show’s five season run, coming in just behind the first season. It’s interesting to watch Love struggle to fix her relationship with Joe and keep their family together while Joe is trying to pull away from her, and they’re surrounded by a great supporting cast while all of this is going on. In the first episode, Joe finds himself falling for their next door neighbor, Michaela McManus as Natalie Engler – so a jealous Love takes her out of the equation, leaving Joe to clean up her mess. This gets the whole community looking for the missing Natalie. We have Scott Speedman as Natalie’s tech-savvy husband Matthew, Dylan Engler as Matthew’s college student stepson Theo (who is very attracted to Love), Shalita Grant as horrendous “momfluencer” Sherry Conrad, Travis Van Winkle as Sherry’s husband Cary, and Mackenzie Astin as anti-vax geology professor Gil Brigham, and Scott Michael Foster as newcaster Ryan Goodwin, among others. Saffron Burrows is also in there as Love’s troubled mother Dottie, Ayelet Zuerer shows up as a therapist that Joe and Love go to, and Tati Gabrielle and Ben Mehl play Marienne Bellamy and Dante Ferguson, Joe’s co-workers at the local library.
The entertainment MVPs in the supporting cast are Grant and Van Winkle, as the Conrads are hilariously dopey characters who, in a standout episode, attempt to bring Joe and Love into their swinger lifestyle. I have been a fan of Van Winkle’s ever since seeing his extremely amusing douchebag performance in the 2009 Friday the 13th movie, and it’s easy to imagine his F13 character aging to become just like Cary Conrad, if only he had survived.
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