For a while now, I’ve been flirting with the idea of doing a weekly podcast. My first thought was to make it movie-centric — since that’s been the focus of so many other areas of my life lately. As I’ve continued to mull over the idea, though, it’s become more and more clear that this needs to be a project that’s almost completely void of movie-related discussion. I need an outlet in my life where I can flex my other creative muscles.

And so was born The Carrying On of a Wayward Son: The Podcast. In every episode, I will have an hour-long chat with a friend about anything and everything. These could be fond bouts of nostalgia about a shared past or dual brainstorming about a hoped-for future. Some of these podcasts will be with my current set of friends. Others will be with old friends I haven’t talked to in years. Even others might potentially be with people I’ve never even met before.

The first episode’s guest is a good friend of mine named Andrew Hollinger. Andrew and I met in 1995 or so when the two of us were in fifth grade. Starting of as fellow Cub Scouts in the same den, we later became classmates and then even later attended the same university. Andrew also was a partner in my first attempt at a podcast — Inkstain, a more literary venture that saw the two of us record pre-written essays. Andrew is currently a high school teacher in the Rio Grande Valley and a frequent writer. You can read some of his past work on his website at www.andrewhollinger.com.

So, without further adieu, here’s the debut episode of The Carrying On of a Wayward Son:

The Carrying on of a Wayward Son: Episode 1 — Andrew Hollinger

How do you want to die?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time. Being an overweight, out-of-shape Hispanic with a family history of Alzheimer’s, diabetes, mental illness and what I’m sure is a host of other surprises just waiting to be discovered as I continue to age, I have a pretty good idea already what the answer to my question is: slow and painfully.

If I had a choice, though, how would I want to bite the big one? And really, I suppose I do have a choice. I could always jump the gun and pick a fight with Big Bad Leroy Brown. Apparently that’d be a pretty reliable way of taking my destiny into my own hands and picking the time, place and method of my demise. As it goes, though, I don’t particularly have a desire to be pummeled to death by the fictional creation of the late Jim Croce. In fact, there are many more ways I would rather not go out than ways I’d be OK with dying. Naturally, right?

I’d rather not drown in my own vomit, be raped to death by Charlie Sheen, have my skull sat upon by an elephant or be sucked out a dime sized hole in a spaceship. It’s not that I fear a violent death, though. If I were in charge of things regarding life and death, I’d rather go out in a blaze of glory than shuffle off the mortal coil while sleeping in a rocking chair as my cataract-filled eyes flicker under heavy lids – remembering a long life spent petting kittens and giving lollypops to grandchildren.

When it comes to my death, I dream big. I want explosions, giant monsters or carnivorous alien conquistadores involved. In other words, I want Michael Bay to direct my demise.

I don’t want to qualify for a Darwin Award, though. Even though my exact thoughts about the afterlife are a little sketchy and I’m not sure if I’ll have the capacity to be embarrassed by my own death, I don’t want to be afraid to visit the local commissary up in heaven and hear the snickering of angels mocking the fact I was eaten by a bear because I forgot to wipe properly during a camping trip and the scent of my poo-smudged butt attracted a family of hungry grizzlies.

I want a death my ancestors can be proud of — a legend they can pass down throughout the ages either as a glorious aspiration for their own lives or a whispered cautionary tale about why it doesn’t pay to be so damn heroic all the time. I don’t care — either one will do.

Despite the near constant presence of choice in our lives, though, I fear destiny will probably have a bigger role to play in my eventual death than I could ever hope to possesses on my own. More so, I fear destiny has a very distinct plan for me post-death, too. When it comes right down to it, I’m just not end of the book material.

In post-apocalyptic stories such as The Stand or The Walking Dead, there are the chosen few whose stories drive the book forward. As they make their way to the end of the tale, they come across the less than fortunate masses whose bodies litter the ditches — providing atmosphere to another’s quest. I fear that even after a non-noteworthy death, I’ll just end up just being the tone-setter to another’s glorious adventure.

Whether my corpse is the puffed-up, horribly decayed body that falls out of a car and scares the lone survivor of a plague-ravaged metropolis as he searches a tunnel for supplies or mine is the tomb that an archeologist of note dumps his equipment on while he searches for buried treasure three graves down the way, I’m just destined to be a footnote in somebody else’s story.

I promise this, though; I’ll be the damn finest footnote you’ve ever seen.

Read more of my insane thoughts on life

Suffering from depression? Great!

1. Read through high school yearbooks — especially the places where friends wrote you personalized messages about just how far you were destined to go in life. Follow that with a good cry as you clip your name tag onto your brightly colored cotton polyester work uniform.
2. Lie in bed, listen to songs by The Hollies and reminisce over relationships that didn’t work out by reading the stash of love letters you still hide under your mattress. Quickly hide the letters when your shrew of a wife comes home and demands you stop dicking around and get dressed so the two of you can go to her ex-boyfriend’s funeral where she will publicly wallow in mourning.
3. Go through your cell phone and delete the numbers from friends you’ve lost touch with. Stare blankly at the two remaining numbers left in your phone’s address book before remembering your parents passed away last fall and their numbers should probably be deleted too.
4. Stare at your face in the mirror for three hours and mark the different ways the years have robbed you of your potential and poured your childhood dreams down the drain — but then remember your dreams can’t fit down the drain because it’s clogged with the hair that has fallen out of your head.
5. Slowly work your way to the bottom of a can of baked beans while you watch episodes of Family Matters from the complete series collection you bought using the insurance money you were given when your only child was crushed by a runaway horse at the rodeo. Wipe away the bean juice from your face that was left when you wiped away the tears that came moments earlier.
6. Clean out and organize your razor blade drawer.
7. Spend an hour staring blankly at the open iTunes window on your laptop as you attempt to make a mix CD. Work your way slowly through the paralyzing realization that no song by The Cure quite summarizes just how sad you are feeling right now.
8. Go through Facebook and look at how successful everybody you hated from high school has become.
9. Passively aggressively comment on your successful high school “friends”’ Facebook photos — remarking on how fat their children look and inquiring whether or not they’ve been diagnosed with child-onset diabetes yet. Then spend the next several minutes hurriedly erasing the comments — not wanting to come off as an asshole months before the 20th high school reunion but not realizing that Facebook has already sent an e-mail alerting your friend of your comment.
10. Sit in the corner of the room, wrapped in a Snuggie and wondering where all your childhood toys are now.
11. Drink your way through a bottle of wine given to you by your boss three weeks before you were laid off and count just how many pills come in a bottle of sleeping pills.
12. Google the names of the people who were hired for the dream job you once applied for but didn’t receive. When you discover their blog, take special note of the entry where they post just how much they hate their job and how it’s only a stepping stone in their planned career.
13. Visit the zoo alone on a Saturday morning and sit on a park bench eating pre-packaged nachos and drinking a liter of cola while you watch the surrounding families blissfully run from cage to cage. Shed a single tear as a mother glances you out of the corner of her eye and tightly pulls her child in closer — fearful that you may be a deadlier predator than any locked in a cage.
14. Give the inside of your oven a through cleaning.
15. Spend three hours sitting on a plastic chair in the layaway section of an inner-city Wal-Mart the week before Christmas. Listen carefully to the cries of children who will wake up to a roll of socks and a halved chocolate bar under their Christmas tree.
16. Count your good-fortune … and then count the good-fortune of your one neighbor down the street who has a pool, a personal humidor and is married to the weather girl from channel 37.
17. Walk through a nursing home on a Tuesday afternoon and stare into the pleading eyes of the elderly as they ask you to help them find the last, vanished segment in the 1000-piece puzzle they’ve just spent the last month of their life working on. As you leave, visit the orderly station where a puzzle piece is framed on the office wall — a trophy to the eternal victory of the young over the old.
18. Watch the big-screen adaptation of The Little Rascals and wonder to yourself just how many of the child actors are now trapped in loveless relationships or have overdosed on drugs. IMDB them to discover most of them ares still now far more successful, richer and attractive than you are.
19. Visit any comic book store and watch as a shopkeeper struggles to maintain a pleasant demeanor as he plays video games and lords over the children who visit his shop regularly but lack the money to actually buy anything — all distractions meant to keep his mind off of the crippling debt that threatens to bankrupt him.
20. Come up with a list of twenty really depressing things not to do when you’re suffering from crippling depression.

Read more of the insane crap that comes from my head

Cause sometimes stupid is fun

1999 was a scary time. There was uncertainty in the streets as people prepared for the Y2K bug that threatened to wipe out the world’s technology and send humanity spiraling back to the stone age where we would have to look to The Flintstones for tips on turning our pets into household appliances.

If it wasn’t the nerds freaking out, it was the religious fanatics who, unaware of how decades or centuries work, thought the year 2000 represented the end of an era and a surefire starting pistol for the end times.

Even worse, in 1999 one of our nation’s favorite adopted sons was suffering a near complete career meltdown. Arnold Schwarzenegger had not had a blockbuster action hit in years — leaving the world unguarded against Eastern European terrorists and robots from the future.

Needing to give his career a booster shot and looking to tie in to some of the fervor that surrounded the impending new year, Schwarzenegger sought to make his big return to the world of action films. And what better baddie to tussle with then the ultimate bad guy — Old Scratch, himself?

End of Days is a 1999 action horror film that pits Schwarzenegger against Satan, as played by Gabriel Byrne. Loud, silly and a whole heaping plate of stupid fun, End of Days is the ultimate New Year’s Eve horror movie — perfect for watching as you count down the end of one year and reminisce all the mistakes you made. As the end credits roll and you realize that you’ve just spent the last two hours of the year watching Schwarzenegger trade one-liners and bullets with the dark prince of hell, you’ll ask yourself, “What’s one more mistake?”

Schwarzenegger stars as Jericho Cane, a depressed, suicidal personal security guard who finds himself wrapped up in Satan’s plot to impregnate the young woman destined to be his bride. Robin Tunney, who in The Craft famously compared the Wiccan religion to the field God and Satan play football on, co-stars as Christine York, Satan’s pre-destined baby mamma.

End of Days is the type of movie that not only believes in sound and fury over substance, but pisses all over substance and then goes to have a three-way with sound, fury and substance’s mother. It’s the type of movie that hires Stan Winston to design an amazing looking Satan and then has it appear almost completely invisible except for 45 seconds at the very end of the movie.

Satan does look awesome in those 45 seconds, though — like a cross between the giant worm demon from The Gate and a Todd McFarlane toy that was never made.

Sure, End of Days is not a good movie but that doesn’t mean it’s not a whole lot of fun. Sometimes you want a horror movie that’s going to reach into your soul and shake the very foundations of your beliefs — an experience that’s comparable to eating a lobster for lunch. But sometimes you just want to eat a KFC Famous Bowl and sit on the toilet for forty-five minutes picking your nose. End of Days is a stupid horror movie but it’s my favorite stupid horror movie about New Year’s Eve.

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Imagine if Wilco did Beetlejuice.

When I first saw All My Friends are Funeral Singers at South by Southwest, I was blown away by the experience. Walking away from the theater, I was a little curious if my extreme enjoyment of the film came from the fact that it was a genuinely great movie or the fact that I had seen the film with a live soundtrack courtesy of Califone, the masterminds behind the film.

After watching the film from the comfort of my home — sans live performance by Califone — I’m a little disappointed to find that All My Friends Are Funeral Singers doesn’t quite live up to memories of my initial encounter with the film.

Written and directed by Califone band member Tim Rutili, All My Friends are Funeral Singers is still an engaging little movie with a pretty top-notch cast headlined by Angela Bettis.

Bettis stars as Zel, a fortune-teller who uses the house full of ghosts that have been passed down to her by her dead grandmother to make a living pretending to tell the future.

In reality, Zel is fed information from her dead pals, the aforementioned funeral singers. The ghosts that live in Zel’s house are not just her partners in crime; they are, for the most part, her friends and even family.

Taken from all walks of life, the ghosts run the spectrum of supernatural hanger-oners.

There’s the former man of the cloth who, in his afterlife, has taken to shacking up with a bride who hung herself with her “something borrowed.” There’s a creepy little girl who, though mute, manages to radiate expression through her wide, aged-beyond-her-years eyes. And, of course, there’s Califone themselves, playing a gaggle of blind ghost musicians who offer the film a folksy, mostly instrumental, soundtrack using a wide assortment of found objects and musical appropriations.

The film trades very much in the quiet moments between characters. As Zel’s houseguests begin to grow weary of being trapped against their will, they slowly loose their cool and start demanding their freedom. Faced with loosing not only her source of income but also her closest friends, Zel is torn between doing the right thing and being left alone in her creaky old house.

Shot through a variety of lenses and shutter speeds, All My Friends are Funeral Singers has the look of a music video for an indie band — albeit an impressive one. Combined with the film’s top-notch acting and engaging soundtrack, the film’s unique visual style helps distinguish All My Friends Are Funeral Singers as a cut above the standard indie band ego project that eventually finds its way to the shelves of your local used DVD store.

While a DVD viewing of All My Friends are Funeral Singers may have suffered in comparison against watching the film while Califone performed the soundtrack live, I can’t help but remain sure that the film is something worth checking out.

I do wish the DVD’s sound-mix was a tad more impressive. I was missing that throbbing soundtrack I had grown used to while playing the film’s soundtrack over my car speakers in the months since watching the film at SXSW.

If a quiet version of Beetlejuice with folk rock sensibilities sounds like it may be your cup of tea, I can’t recommend All My Friends are Funeral Singers enough.

You may, however, want to look into kidnapping the band to perform the soundtrack live from the hole you have in your basement. When they finish, you can talk about them putting the lotion on the skin.

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Doggie want a biscuit?

I really wanted to like Wolf Moon, the new werewolf film from writer/director Dana Mennie. I saw what Mennie and co-writer Ian Cook were trying to do with their film and I could appreciate some of it — but in the end, Wolf Moon is a movie in need of some serious editing.

Chris Divecchio stars as Dan, a mysterious drifter who wonders into a small town where he meets and falls in love with Amy, a young girl played by Ginny Weirick. Soon, Dan and Amy are experiencing their very own little love montage — but things turn hairy when Amy discovers Dan’s dark secret: he’s a werewolf.

It seems Dan is the recipient of a curse passed on by his dear old dad, an even more mysterious drifter played by Max Ryan. When the moon turns full, Dan and his pa Bender turn into bloodthirsty killing machines.

The only way Dan is going to rid himself of his curse is if he takes out his father, a man who, over the years, has embraced his curse to the point where he’s become a monster inside and out.

Rounding out the cast are Maria Conchita Alonso as Sam, the town’s sheriff; Chris Mulkey as John, Amy’s father; Billy Drago as Charles Thibodeaux, a cop turned werewolf hunter; and Sid Haig as Crazy Louis, the town rabblerouser and resident badass.

Clocking in at a little over two hours, Wolf Moon is longer than your average low-budget horror flick. Unfortunately, at least a half hour of that running time is wasted on unnecessary scenes poorly strung together with no real concern to the film’s overall narrative flow.

Chronology and logic are tossed aside with little thought and it shows. One should never get bored during a werewolf movie but I found myself fidgeting before the film’s halfway mark due to the excessive unnecessary scenes. Wolf Moon tries to do too much and, ultimately, the film’s enthusiasm is its own undoing.

Flashbacks, sub-plots and redundant character actions muddy the water and turn what could have been a cool southwestern creature feature with a twist of romance into a tedious Twilight-esque exercise in endurance.

I’m all for giving horror film characters some emotional weight and if that means adding some romance into the equation, go for it. In the end, though, a romantic sub-plot between Amy’s father and the town’s smokin’ hot Latina sheriff fails to add much to the overall story and just means more time where audiences find themselves waiting for the plot to unfold.

The same goes for the lengthy flashback to Drago’s cop character’s past. What could easily been summarized in a few short minutes is dragged on as Max Ryan is given a chance to mug it up in front of the camera.

The fact that half the supporting cast are also producers on the film could explain why they appear much more then they need to. There is absolutely no reason why Haig’s character should take part in the film’s climax other than the fact that he’s a recognizable actor and hard-core horror fans will cheer when they see him tangle with a werewolf. The cheers of the few hurt the heads of the many, though.

As Bender, the film’s central baddie, Max Ryan doesn’t just chew the flesh of his victims, he chews every bit of scenery he can find. Doing his best Randall Flagg impression, Ryan acts with extreme gusto — albeit slightly misplaced gusto.

Ryan’s character officially crosses into the land of ridiculous when he begins to quote Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London.

Speaking of werewolves, I will give the film props for trying to bring a full-fledged wolf man to the screen. I’ve always preferred my werewolves equal parts wolf and man and the lycanthrope of Wolf Moon delivers that quite nicely.

Instead of piling on a lot of rubber and excessive prosthetics, the creature designers from Wolf Moon put together a monster that is streamlined enough to jump around but hairy enough to not be mistaken for a mime.

Looking like a cross between the X-Men’s Beast and the facial make-up design of the djinn from Wishmaster, the film’s werewolves aren’t half bad — though the filmmakers may have gone a bit overboard with the fangs. The film’s monsters have some serious overbite.

As for the rest of the film’s make-up and special effects, I have no complaints. Obvious care was given towards the film’s gore and dismemberments and the camera stays on the effects just long enough for them to make their mark without loosing any mystique.

I just wish more thought had been put into the film’s story. Wolf Moon could have been a really fun flick but not even a scene set in my hometown of Houston could convince me that it wasn’t anything but unfinished.

A little more time in the editing room and the film could make for a really fun SyFy original movie. As it stands now, though, Wolf Moon is not worth rushing out to go see anytime soon.

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Let’s go Bolling!

Rampage, the new film from director Uwe Boll, is morally reprehensible, utterly without merit and completely watchable.

Boll, no stranger to criticism, wrote and directed Rampage, a sociopathic bloodbath that plays like a mixture of Falling Down, Elephant and Grand Theft Auto — as seen through the eyes of an angsty teenager who consists solely on a diet of energy drinks, heavy metal music and a complete lack of hugs.

Brendan Fletcher stars as Bill, an emotionally distant young adult drifting through life seemingly without a direction. His days are spent either sulking in his parent’s basement, where he alternates between reading and wailing on his punching bag, or working at a local garage. Bill’s only friend is Evan, a would-be political activist who is all bite and no bark, and his parents want him to move out of their house. To top it all off, Bill can’t get a decent cup of coffee to save his life. Sure he has his problems but it’s not exactly like Bill’s living a tumultuous life or anything.

Regardless, Bill is pissed off and he decides to do something about it — namely putting together a full-body suit of Kevlar armor, arming himself with a pair of guns and going on a good ol’ fashioned killing spree.

The film’s marketing campaign tries to sell the film as a revenge thriller and claim that Bill’s killing spree is somehow about vengeance. Vengeance for what? The closest thing Bill is given as a motive for doing what he does is that people are kinda mean to him. So freakin’ what? If somebody cuts me off in traffic, am I justified in blowing his brains out?

Rampage is exactly the type of film that would never have gotten released in the late ‘90s, when school shootings were seemingly happening every other week. How quickly we forget.

Bill’s titular rampage consists of him blowing up the police station, mowing down dozens of innocent bystanders and, worse of all, getting away with it.

Trust me when I say I’m not one to come down on the side of censorship and I’ve never been somebody who crusades against free speech but even I found my limits tested while watching Rampage, a film with a truly questionable message.

Fletcher, long a familiar face among Canadian-shot B-movies, gets his chance to shine as a mass-murdering monster. Between making his best sexy eyes in front of a web camera while spouting off Nazi-esque slogans and trying his best to pull off the type of nuanced nuttiness of Brad Pitt’s work in 12 Monkeys, Fletcher comes close to succeeding in humanizing his character. Unfortunately, Boll’s script does not give him much to work with.

The first half of the movie consists of Bill wandering through his not-so-bad life listlessly interacting with his friends and family. Brief flashes to the carnage to come break up what could otherwise be confused with a slice-of-life drama.

By the time the massacre begins, though, the film has devolved into a derivative cartoon, offering up no more human emotion or depth than a shoot ‘em up first-person-shooter video game.

Boll has put me in a real awkward position with Rampage. I hate to be the voice of the indignant audience member shocked into a stupor but I just couldn’t get over how inappropriate of a film Rampage was. The senseless violence, mixed message and lack of a hero whom audiences could root for left the film feeling like a ship without a rudder — aimlessly meandering through the waters of sensationalized controversy for controversy’s sake.

It’s one thing to make a movie that outrages the audience but gets them thinking about a deeper, important meaning. Boll, it seems, has made a movie that shocks audiences just to shock them. Quick-cut editing, a throbbing rock soundtrack and some very loose skirting around arm-chair philosophy leaves Rampage looking like a student film from a burgeoning serial killer.

Having seen more then a few of Boll’s films in the last few years, I’ve long since decided he is not a filmmaker worthy of quick dismissal. There is definitely something going on up in his head — which is more than could be said about most of the “bad” directors still working in Hollywood today.

Rampage is not a bad movie, technically. Morally, it’s reprehensible. I’m sure it will find appreciation and admiration from the same audience that made Faces of Death and its ilk such an underground hit.

I won’t go as far as to say I hated Rampage, but I will say this: I sure wish I had seen a movie called Rampage about giant monkeys and giant lizards attacking buildings instead of the Rampage I did see.

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Watch recycled movies! They’re good for the environment and okay for you!

I have a confession to make. I’ve never really been a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I know, I know. Me being a connoisseur of bad movies and not having a soft spot for MST3K is just ridiculous. I’ve certainly tried my hardest to enjoy the show — forcing myself to watch episodes long after I’ve established that I wasn’t really digging the show creators’ shtick. I’ve even tried Rifftrax, the latest project from the MST3K guys and no dice.

I enjoyed watching the movies that were heckled on MST3K but sitting back and letting other people heckle a movie for me has always just seemed lazy. If I am going to take the time to watch a bad movie, I’d rather listen to the taunts and jeers coming from the mouths of my friends and myself.

I admit my dislike of MST3K only as a way of explaining that I was probably not the best audience for Sex Galaxy, a “recycled” movie that, in my eyes, played like a slightly raunchier version of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Billed as the world’s first “green” movie, Mike Davis claims his film is 100 percent taken from clips from the annals of bad movie history. And, besides a short bit that, if the credits are to be believed, was shot exclusively for Sex Galaxy, it seems Davis has indeed done his best to spin straw into gold.

Sex Galaxy was written and “directed” by Mike Davis. In reality, Mike took a bunch of old science fiction films from the public domain archive, reedited clips from the films to form a type of Frankenstein-esque monster of cheesy sci-fi goodness, and then redubbed the voices of the characters — giving a blue-humor edge to the archetypical astronaut explorer characters that made ‘50s science fiction movies their home.

In Davis’ patchwork film, future Earth is in disarray. Overpopulation and global warming has driven society towards outlawing recreational sex. Men the planet over are suffering from the biggest case of blue balls in human history.

This is why, when a group of astronauts discover a planet inhabited only by sex-crazed females, they decide to make a pit stop for a little R&R.

Unfortunately for the astronauts, the planet’s supply of women is controlled by a Pimpbot, a robotic hustler with a tight grip over his brothel of ho’s. Talking like a reject from a blaxplotation film, the Pimpbot won’t let anybody touch his women — unless they pay the proper price.

The Pimpbot is not the only danger waiting for the astronauts, though. There are also massive dinosaurs, killer monsters and the explorers’ own insatiable lust.

I can recognize Davis’ accomplishment in utilizing footage from films of the past and creating a new story that plays like a cross between an episode of Futurama and the early raunchy-for-raunchy sake episodes from the first few seasons of South Park. It takes a lot of skill and work to do what Davis did. I just wish I could enjoy it as much as he wanted audiences to.

The humor played overly juvenile and I quickly became bored after the joke of seeing classic clips of sci-fi movies with raunchy humor dubbed over wore off.

The story was, as you might expect, a bit threadbare — merely a loose weave to connect the film’s jokes and keep the plot moving.

Davis tried hard to create something new but in the end, Sex Galaxy felt like something I had already seen in the past a dozen times before — whether on MST3K or on any of the cheap attempts to ape the style that have seeped out over YouTube.

While it wasn’t my cup of tea, I’m sure there are those out there who would get a real kick out of Sex Galaxy. They are probably in middle school or have the mental capacity of somebody that age but they will probably enjoy the cast of talented voice actors Davis recruited and the way that educational stock footage is used as gross-out humor.

I have no doubt that there are those that will enjoy Sex Galaxy — I just wasn’t one of them or would want to be friends with any of them.

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A movie the filmmakers hope will make you laugh until you’ve spoofed all over your pants.

I’m not sure when “spoof” became a dirty word but, after watching The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It (henceforth referred to as 41-Year-Old Virgin), I feel as desensitized as if I had just spent the afternoon with a ex-con/pirate with Tourette’s.

The film is, as you may have guessed from its obnoxiously long title, a spoof of the films directed and produced by Judd Apatow. Director Craig Moss, a filmmaker whose only previous claim to fame had been directing a short film titled Saving Ryan’s Privates, co-wrote 41-Year-Old Virgin with writing partner Brad Kaaya. Together, the two of them made a concentrated effort to jam-pack as many pop culture references and unfunny sight gags into an hour and a half as they possibly could.

Making a funny parody is hard enough work. Making a movie that attempts to cleverly send-up films that are already highly regarded for their comedic wit just seems suicidal.

There are moments in 41-Year-Old Virgin where scenes from Superbad or Knocked Up are taken, stripped of any form of wit or intelligence and repackaged as dumbed down trash seemingly leftover on the cutting room floor from the worst seasons of MadTV.

At first, it might appear the filmmakers were actually geniuses, cleverly mocking the often juvenile nature of Apatow’s films, but, as the film clearly begins to play off its depressingly awful material for laughs with instead of laughs at, it becomes obvious that the film’s writers were just huge fans of Apatow’s work that were determined to create an homage to his material but clearly lacking the talent to do so.

While it’s true that Moss and Kaaya have made a movie deserving just as much derision and bile as the cinematic turds pooped out by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, what’s even worse of a crime is the fact that, nestled like sprinkles on a moldy cupcake, there are a few bits of genuinely funny material in 41-Year-Old Virgin — unfortunately these moments are mostly hidden behind the same old tired pop culture gags that doom nearly every modern spoof movie that’s been released in the last 15 years.

In the film, MadTV star Bryan Callen stars as Andy, the titular 41-year-old virgin. Andy lives in a house filled to the brim with practically every single Judd Apatow character archetype. But when I say archetype, I don’t really mean that. In reality, instead of presenting new and original characters that fit the Apatow mold and crafting craft jokes around them, the filmmakers behind 41-Year-Old Virgin have literally cherry-picked characters from Apatow’s films, hired look-alike actors (or ones who can do a pretty decent vocal impression) and ratcheted up the absurd to astronomical proportions — for example, there’s Stephen Kramer Glickman as Seth, an obese hairy slacker who does a pretty good Seth Rogan impression and walks around cracking “You know how I know you’re gay” jokes before randomly breaking into a Daniel Plainview impression.

There is somewhat of a plot involving Andy’s quest to loose his virginity with the help of his miscreant friends — including a randomly thrown in character named Blaqguy that serves as a combination of a Benjamin Button spoof and a Romany Malco stand-in (though, the filmmakers dress him as Samuel L. Jackson).

There is really no point in summarizing the movie, though, as the plot is a threadbare excuse to link as many of the gags as possible into some semblance of a story. Besides the Apatow spoofs, there are gags parodying Twilight, Slumdog Millionaire, Grand Theft Auto and the popular Dos Equis commercials featuring The Most Interesting Man in the World.

At least the film’s cinematographer knew how to movie a camera — with several scenes in the film aping not only the jokes but also the styles and camera movements of the film it is parodying.

41-Year-Old Virgin is exactly the type of uninspired parody crap that has been dumped into audiences laps (and eaten up by the great unwashed masses) for the last few years ad nauseam. Craig Moss is just the latest perpetrator of bad filmmaking — the biggest difference between him and the rest of the cinematic terrorists being, he should no better.

As I skimmed through the DVD’s special features, time and time again Moss and his co-writer specifically named the reasons why modern parody movies are so awful — and then they went and made one anyway. The actors, during their interviews, blatantly make the claim that they were attempting to out-funny the funny movies they are parodying.

By the way, Craig Moss and the “comedy” team of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg will get the chance to have a battle of the unfunny spoofs this fall when they release competing Twilight spoofs. Hold still my beating heart.

There is nothing wrong with making fun of good films — parodies and spoofs have long served a purpose of keeping egos and checks and taking the air out of overinflated tires. That said, it takes some real balls to razz on talented people when you, yourself, have no talent.

Wait a minute… Was that irony sinking in?

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Superheroes! So damn hot right now!

With the success of Iron Man 2 and the looming madness of Marvel’s continued Avengers franchise and Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film, it’s clear that superhero films aren’t going anywhere — pretty good for a film genre that almost died out a little more than ten years ago.

After the crippling disaster that was Batman and Robin and the trail of the dead superhero franchises that paved the way to Joel Schumacher even getting the job in the first place, at the turn of the decade superhero films looked to be going the way of the Western or the Las Vegas prostitute who is accidentally murdered in a night of carnal pleasures, taken out to the desert and buried next to a coyote den.

Then came X-Men, Bryan Singer’s mostly mature look at comic book heroes, and everything changed. Now, superhero films are more often than not targeted to the parents of children instead of the bright-eyed toddlers wearing Superman underoos.

As I went and saw Iron Man 2, I wondered if children were even able to absorb any of the film’s plot (and subsequently, wondered if this will damn the comic book industry when it eventually finds itself unable to bring in new, younger readers to replace the ones dying of heart failure as the years of Taco Bell and Mountain Dew diets finally collapses their arteries). A part of me pines for the days of family-friendly superhero movies — the “gee wow” masked heroics that I watched as a kid and that formed me into the lifelong fan of comic books that I am today.

Then I watch a film like Supersonic Man, a 1979 Spanish/Italian child-friendly superhero film, and I drop all notions of chasing Christopher Nolan away from Batman with pitchforks and torches. I even come close to committing sepaku in shame for even doubting Mr. Nolan.

In Supersonic Man, directed by Juan Piquer Simon, Antonio Cantafora plays Paul, a private detective sporting a wickedly awesome porn star mustache. The mustache isn’t the only thing Paul has going for him, though. Paul is secretly Kronos, an extraterrestrial from a distant galaxy who was sent to Earth to guide us stupid humans towards world peace.

Naturally, this means donning a brightly colored costume and using god-like powers to tangle with giant robots and unitard-wearing evil geniuses played by Cameron Mitchell.

When Paul twists a ring on his finger and repeats the clearly non-copyright infringing oath “May the great force of the galaxy be with me,” he is transformed (literally — his heroic identity is played by another actor, Jose Luis Ayestaran) into Supersonic, a superhero sadly lacking a mustache but who does have the amazing abilities of flight, super strength and the transubstantiation of guns into bananas.

As a superhero, Supersonic will gladly save a person’s life, but as Paul, he’ll even more gladly mock his adoring fans for believing such silly things as superheroes even exist. At that point, he’ll fly away to catch criminals in a net, take them into a secluded field and then torture them by making them look at his gaudy costume.

Supersonic fights sharks, steals champagne from restaurants, gives booze to recovering alcoholics, hides from flamethrowers behind his girlfriend and all around blows as a superhero. He can single-handedly destroy gigantically impressive space stations just by flying through them as supersonic speeds, so I guess he has that going for him.

Supersonic Man is a silly relic from the past — proof that Europeans, for all their highfalutin snobbery, are not above aping America’s pop culture and removing everything that was remotely fun or interesting about it.

Supersonic Man is bad cinema at its worst – only recommended to those who are either masochistic or mad scientists in need of a torture device to pry the secret identity out of captured superheroes. I’m just kidding. He doesn’t recommend Supersonic Man to anybody.

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