Sarcastic Movie Reviews

You know it’s a bad sign when a movie is called “88 Minutes” and the running time is “108 minutes.”

That’s like going into Kentucky Fried Chicken and finding out that they’ve added nacho cheese and oyster sauce to the eleven herbs and spices.

Sometimes more isn’t necessarily better.

“88 Minutes” is one of those films that I like to call the “crowd killer” genre.

There’s a killer in the crowd and it’s up to you to figure out which one is guilty.

The first axiom of lazy screenwriting is “The more fleeting the screen time, the more likely that he (or she) is the killer”.

Clues? You want clues? You don’t need no stinking clues. The killer could be the dead guy rotting in the middle of the room (thank you “Saw”). This is all about false leads and pointless back stories.

Let’s begin at the beginning (the theme from here on is “state the obvious”).

The movie opens with the killer climbing into an apartment of a woman who is wandering around looking for her pet cat named “kitty”.

Hey, guess what audience? You’re a bunch of idiots. We have to name the cat after a cat so that you won’t get confused.

 Ahhhhh, I get it.

Wait a second.

Wasn’t “Kitty” also a prostitute in “Gunsmoke”?

See, now I AM confused.

Do I pay for sex with a rubber mouse?

Should I be feeding my cat flavoured lube? (not unless you want your very own Jackson Pollack painting on the hardwood floor in the morning)

But listen, as long as we’re being obvious, then maybe you  should be wandering around the theatre looking for “Refund”.

Back to the moron with the no-name pet. She’s attacked (without screaming) and the killer installs an elaborate pulley system in her apartment so that he can hang her upside down and bleed her out like hog in a smokehouse.

Oh, women’s groups are going to LOVE this film.

They actually spend more time showing us the torture and murder of the woman than they do with the arrest, and conviction of the criminal.

Don’t worry, the cat escapes unharmed.

The controversy with the conviction is that it is based on the dubious eyewitness identification from a victim that was hung upside down while drugged, and psychological profiling by Al Pacino’s character (who is a college professor).

If he was black, all that they would have needed for a conviction was an expired bus transfer.

Fast forward a decade, and the killer is proclaiming his innocence on CNN as the day of his execution rapidly approaches.

Not surprisingly, another spate of identical murders starts to crop up making the public wonder if the doomed man is indeed innocent.

Hey, so far so good right?

Ok, so we already know that the broads are pissed off at the movie because of the gratuitous, bondage, sex, torture, murder scene right?

Let’s crank it up a notch.

Why not have a sixty eight year old man wake up from a post coital embrace to a clock radio blaring hip hop, while his twenty something conquest does naked gymnastics in her living room?

Get it?

The girl is young because she listens to rap.

Al is old because he doesn’t like it.

Again we’re way too stupid to just count the chins flapping around Al’s neck to understand the age difference.

Here Kitty!!

So just to keep tally on the pissed off chicks, that’s one scene of a degrading killing, followed by a nude stretching scene that looks ominously familiar to the way the other babe was murdered.

As long as her ankle is up around her head, she should be ironing his shirt too!!

Anyway, Al (with his jet black hair) starts to get phone calls from reporters who want to know what he thinks about the copy cat murders.

Logically, he insists that the murderer must have had a partner, because that’s the only way that they could mimic the crimes down to the smallest detail.

Except he starts getting phone calls from someone who rented the same voice synthesizer as the serial killer in “Saw”.

“88 minutes Doc. Tick tock. Tick tock.” The voice says.

Me? When I become a serial murderer I’m going to synthesize the voice of “Borat”.

“Wawaweewaa”, now you die Vanilla face!”

In the midst of the killer countdown, we begin to learn a few disturbing facts about Al. It seems that he’s carrying around some latent guilt because his little sister was murdered when he was out of the house.

Why is this important?

It’s not.

It’s yet another ruse to make you waste mental energy trying to piece together the past with the present.

They might as well have had him explaining his first part time job at Safe Way counting Q-Tips in the shipping department.

Each scene introduces us to another one of his students who may or may not be the killer. Or is it his secretary? Maybe it’s the cop who helps him out? It could be Darth Vader for all that matters.

Here’s one guarantee you can take with you. The more suspicious the person acts, the more innocent they are.

The guy with the pulleys, throwing knives, and wood chipper is the guy you could trust your wallet with.

The crippled priest who grows potpourri?

Psycho…

Just pick a character after the first 20 minutes and no matter what happens keep saying “There’s the killer” to your friends. You stand a one in eighteen chance of impressing the hell out of them.

Logic has nothing to do with it, and there’s no way you’d ever be able to re-watch the film and say “How could I have missed the fact that he owns a rope factory?!!”

Here are two theories that we came up with that are much better than the real ending.

Al put the wrong man in jail for killing his little sister, and THAT man’s family is out for revenge by making Al look like a fool (assuming that the back story had a point, which it doesn’t).

Or…

Al Pacino is really the killer and this was some sort of twisted “A Beautiful Mind” split personality angle.

Oh, I like that one.

The real ending looks and sounds like it was written by an unemployed porno cameraman on a Wednesday afternoon.

If you want to unravel a REAL mystery, ask yourself why Al Pacino agreed to star in this piece of crap?

Two Kitties out of Five.

“Drive home safe.”

Wow, those words sound friendly enough, but metallic snap of the binder as it slammed closed, was punctuation enough that we could read between the lines.

Get out, and don’t come back.

Ever.

You don’t mean the “ever” in the quantum physics kind of way do you? I mean, do atoms have to stop vibrating before we can come back? Do we have to wait for a Stanley Cup parade in Toronto?

Forever means forever in my case, and really I can’t say that I blame them.  I drank their iced tea and walked around for four hours looking at catalogues. Talk about a tease! No court in the land would convict them if they just threw me down and ravaged my bank account. I was asking for it. What kind of self respecting person goes into a dark warehouse if they don’t know what’s coming?

I’m getting ahead of myself though.

It all started a few weeks ago when I got a call from “Direct Buy” to visit their showroom.

You see, you have to be invited to see what’s inside of that suspicious looking building sitting in that industrial park wherever you live.

Is that where Oompa Loompas live? I heard that U2 rehearses their live material before going out on a tour in there. 

I HAD to find out what was going on inside.

“Kevin” (the telemarketer) was practically giddy as he took down my personal information. Within days I would be getting a special package with everything I needed to know about “Direct Buy”. I could have sworn, he used the words “Golden Ticket” and there were tiny voices singing songs in the background, but I have a very vivid imagination.

Anyway, I ran to the mailbox every day for a week in anticipation. Not since the great “Sea Monkey” fiasco of 1973 has a postman been more annoyed with me.

Then the magical day came.

There was a bright white envelope with a glossy twelve page brochure inside, filled with satisfied multicultural families looking at their contemporary leather sofas and multi directional brass ceiling fans.

And then, there they were.

A pair of tickets into the warehouse with the names of my spouse and myself emblazoned on them.

Ok, maybe “emblazoned” is a bit of an exaggeration.

How about laser printed?

Still, they spelled my name right which is more than I can say for five high school yearbooks in my basement.

The hair on my shoulder blades stood on end.

When the day arrived for the grand tour, we were greeted by a team of smiling, perky people who presented us with oversized novelty sticky nametags like contestants on a glittering daytime game show.

Jamie and Jenn? Come on down!!

There’s even some FREE iced tea. Would you like some iced tea? Have some iced tea. There’s a fresh pitcher or iced tea over there. Everybody is having the iced tea.

Then, before the ice has settled in the bottom of my Styrofoam cup, we’re hustled into a large screening room faster than Katie Holmes in Tom Cruise’s mansion to begin the indoctrination.

This is where we learned how fantastic the savings are at “Direct Buy” and how stupid everyone else is for paying the outrageous markups that fester in every retail store outside of this glorious white building.

Oh, and if we didn’t agree to pay the almost $8000 membership fee on the spot then we’d never be allowed inside the store again.

I swear to God, I heard a wolf howling outside when we were given the ultimatum.

“On the spot” is also a bit of an exaggeration. We could wander around the warehouse looking at the walls of catalogues that are filled with columns of numbers as long as we wanted.

Well, that is until “June” our hostess began to get annoyed with us.

June became really excited when she discovered that we wanted to renovate our kitchen.

This is where the big savings come in.

It’s one thing to try and make a two hundred dollar savings on a toilet seem like the deal of a century to someone writing an eight thousand dollar cheque (actually, you only have to come up with something like fifty seven hundred at first), but when you find out that everyone else in the warehouse is saving ten, fifteen, and TWENTY thousand dollars on their new kitchens you’d have to be an idiot not to sign up.

Honey, how big is our kitchen anyway?

The only way we’re going to fit an island in our kitchen is if we stop sweeping up the dust bunnies and they form a lump somewhere.

Still, even with our ten foot by fourteen foot space I’m sure that we can have some sort of artificially coloured particle board interior cabinet with brushed nickel knobs mounted on the walls at a fraction of the cost that we’d spend at Ikea. I’m sure that they don’t wobble like the ones in the showroom either. Now, where the heck is the catalogue so that we can actually see what’s available? Oh… June has one.

Except that she’s not going to show it to us yet.

Strange.

June is also really excited about the kitchen designer on today.

Apparently she’s Oriental.

Geeze, I knew that in my racial stereotyping handbook that Orientals were good at math, but apparently they’re fantastic at knocking down walls and placing range hoods as well.

Maybe I can get a black guy to design my home theatre, or are Mexicans better at that sort of thing?

Anyway, it’s a moot point because she’s not in today after all.

Those crazy white people can’t read a schedule.

We did meet another nice designer who would be willing to help us design our kitchen for one hundred dollars an hour (minimum three hours) if we did it in the warehouse. It’s one hundred and fifty if she comes over to our house.

Holy crap, is she driving a Hummer? How expensive is the gas to my house? I live ten minutes away.

That’s another thing we noticed. There are lots of swatches of cloth and samples of tumbled marble or hardwood. Everything is designed to overwhelm, but fortunately there’s a designer willing to help you out.

For a cost.

Getting back to June. Was that an insult she just tossed our way? I could have sworn that she it was our fault for getting confused because we asked for some private time to look over the catalogues.

Nah, she offered me iced tea.

What a nice lady.

See how helpful she is? She has her hand clamped firmly on the kitchen info we wanted to see. It’d be a tragedy if it fell off the desk and onto the floor. The funny thing is that June won’t show us the kitchen stuff until we agree to become members.

That’s weird.

Well, see how nice she is? When we seem a bit concerned about forking over almost six thousand dollars, she offers to let us pay in installments and it’s only going to add seventeen percent to the total.

What sweethearts.

Well that’s ok June, because we have a line of credit that charges us five percent so we can do it on our own.

But, you know, right now it’s a bad time for us. We have to replace our roof, and I’m going to owe a lot in taxes next year, so we won’t be able to save up the fifteen thousand or so dollars we’ll need to spend to save the eight thousand dollars you want to charge us for our membership fees for about four more years.

The thing is June, that the membership is only good for ten years. Half of it will be gone before we get around to using it.

June’s demeanor changes at this stage.

Why did we come in then?

Well, we didn’t realize that it was a one time offer.

Didn’t we read the glossy 12 page booklet?

Um, er, we just sort of, uh, glanced at it.

“Well, most ADULTS read it before coming in.” (I’m not kidding you. She actually said that word for word).

How dare we waste her time?!

She didn’t actually say that, but her broad grin had tightened into a thin line with tiny upward curves at each side.

No greater outrage has been perpetrated upon a gracious host since the Campbells massacred the MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692.

I feel like such a bastard.

June kept smiling though even as she wished us a safe journey with a snap of her binder and quick one hundred and eighty degree pivot.

Surprisingly though, there were no wolves waiting for us when we got outside, and it was only then that I realized that I didn’t even get a chance to meet an Oompa Loompa.

By the way, we checked the brochure when we got home and it never said anything about a “take it or leave it” one time offer.

Hey, let’s go buy a plasma screen tv at Costco. I suddenly have an extra eight grand burning a hole in my pocket!!