Film

If you read my review of Stanley's Dragon, you probably remember me saying that I picked up a copy of the Legend of Zelda TV show as a backup, in case the former wasn't up to my standards or caused my DVD player to spontaneously combust. While I didn't need it then, I ended up watching some episodes anyway because I was bored on a Friday night and UMIX was canceled.

Now, if you have the stones to consider yourself even the slightest bit nerdy, you've probably watched at least one episode of this show and know how utterly terrible it is. If you're not a complete nerd, you've still probably seen some mangled clip of it while wading through a steaming pile of youtube poop. Most likely, it was some shoddily-made two-minute iMovie video of Link telling the king he wants to eat a ton of dinner repeated a million times over or something like that.


Oh wait, that's not the shitty TV show. That's the shitty video game. Let's just say there's not a whole lot of difference between the two and leave it at that, shall we?

So, if the show's so bad and so many people already make fun of it, why watch it at all? Well, it turns out that something good did in fact come out of this series. It's what I like to call "The Legend of Zelda Drinking Game." Of course, I don't drink. I have too much self respect for that, and spend my Friday evenings doing something respectable, like attending UMIX. But if any of you deviant sinning hooligans are interested, you can learn about the game after the jump.

Ah, Spring Break. Even if it comes in the dead middle of winter, it's still pretty awesome. Especially when it won't stop snowing and the temperature is barely over twenty degrees. Stuck inside, I decided to do what I always do--watch a movie. So I drove to the nearest video rental place (a Family Video so shady that I'd almost rather be walking through the back alleys of Ann Arbor at 2am) and looked around for something fun and exciting.

Or something that looked like shit. Either would work.

Then I saw it. The cover had it all: a painful pun (get ready for some prehysterics!), an androgynous animatronic (in terms of species, and I didn't know that was even possible), and a dazed dude staring sideways at the reject robot (this alliteration, however, was unfortunately absent). Stanley's Dragon, the title proclaimed. The "O" in dragon was even replaced by an egg. This looked way too stupid to pass by.

Remember Vanilla Ice? Maybe his hit 1990 single, "Ice, Ice, Baby" rings a bell? Well, it seems that contrary to popular belief, he's not dead yet. In fact, it seems he's doing quite well for himself. As if the billions he made over the course of his lucrative, decade-spanning rap career weren't enough, he's also made quite a pretty penny flipping houses on the real estate market. In fact, he's become such a good contractor, that he recently landed himself a show on the DIY network, "The Vanilla Ice Project." And it must be a hit, because apparently it's been greenlit for a second season. The Gargoyle didn't want to be left out of this quality program's obviously expansive viewership, so a few of the staff sat down to watch the pilot episode.

Disclaimer: As the title indicates, this article was written by the lovely and talented Allison Hawkins, who unlike Michael Stephens possesses the ability to watch movies with girls in them (I'm afraid the cooties will come through the screen).

Have you ever watched a movie and found yourself thinking something along the lines of "Dear God, why?" or "Is it illegal to gouge your own eyes out?" I think it's kind of like puberty or death - almost everyone has to go through it at one time or another, some later than others, and it's generally an unpleasant experience. But then there is the rare occasion where a movie walks the fine line between laugh-out-loud funny and downright atrocious. We commonly give these films the honor of being called "so bad it's good." I'm sure most of you are familiar with the reigning champion of this genre, The Room, and if you're not, grab your car keys and head to the nearest Walmart $5 movie bargain bin immediately. At any rate, that's not the film I watched recently. Instead, I bore witness to the joy that is Elvira's Haunted Hills.

Last night a gem of heavy socio-economic commentary by the name of The Perfect Teacher debuted on the Lifetime Movie Network (station of note for its equal cultural relevance) in the coveted 8 P.M. Sunday time slot. Directed by Jim Donovan, a relative newcomer to the television movie scene, but notable for his several "unknown episodes" of "MTV's Undressed" (1999) and the surprisingly well-received (and possibly typo-plagued) 3 Saisons (2009), the story centers on Devon (Megan Park), who we are asked as an audience to believe is seventeen (she's 24 and distractingly good looking), and who is head-over-insane-psycho-betch-heels in love with her teacher, Jim Wilkes (David Charvet).