PSYCHO BABYSITTERS AND ELEPHANT VAGINAS....THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!

It's quarter to three.....there's no one in the place....'cept you and me.....and 300 gloriously atrocious movies running rampant through our cable movie insomnia-ridden nights.....here's two more haunting us in dark-night-of-the-soul wee hours......

EMELIE (2015) The makers of this nasty brief little horror outing must have thought they stumbled on to a unique concept....the deranged, homicidal babysitter. Not quite new, boys. Marilyn Monroe gave this familiar archetype a spin in "Don't Bother To Knock", which dates all the way back to l952.

Here we have Sarah Bolger playing a seemingly mild mannered young woman embarking on an evening of watching over three young kids, two sugar-fueled, ADD tots and one sullen older boy (about 11) who resents being babysat.  Well, pretty soon all three of them resent the sitter as she quickly reveals herself as an unhinged sadist, feeding the little girl's hamster to the little boy's pet snake and settling them all down in front of the TV to binge-watch porn.  Plus she plans to cap off the evening by abducting the youngest boy as a replacement for her own dead child........we bet her hourly rate is even more shocking than the rest of that stuff.

This all descends rapidly into the usual by-the-numbers horror movie tropes, which movies like this adhere to as rigidly as Kabuki theater or haiku, A few curves pop up, such as the loony sitter's mysterious accomplice, who turns out as dopey and unlucky as his cohort. The filmmakers top off their little nothing of a scarefest with a delusion-of-grandeur final shot....setting up a sequel. Nobody should hold their breath waiting for "Emelie 2: The Devil's Daycare" or whatever they planned to call it. BQ can only scare up 1 star.......with or without children, you won't want to bring this sitter home.

THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY (2016) effectively demotes its whip-smart writer-director Sasha Baron Cohen from cutting edge social satirist ("Borat", Bruno") to worn out British imitation Adam Sandler. The plentiful gross out gags are all in place but none of them, a parade of bodily fluids, genitalia and assorted anal abuse, serve to highlight Cohen's withering view of humanity's foibles. Don't look for any ironic subtext here....the gags are just there to make you go "eewwwwwww." Nothing more.

Cohen plays Nobby, a lower (or we should say lowest) class soccer-besotted lunkhead who reconnects with his long lost brother. The brothers,separated when they were young orphans, have certainly become different people.....Nobby's brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) is now an efficiently lethal MI6 superspy, a Bondian/Bourne killing machine. You can easily figure out the rest....Nobby ends up as his brother's unwanted sidekick, while they're pursued by thugs in the service of an international archvillainess (Penelope Cruz). In the course of their misadventures, they inadvertently shoot a wheelchair-bound child and infect Daniel Radcliffe with HIV (don't ask). In the film's centerpiece sequence (we get the feeling Cohen wrote the entire movie around this scene), the brothers hide from their pursuers inside an elephant's vagina....and yes, if you expect Cohen to double down and triple down on this gag, he will not disappoint you.

"Brothers Grimsby"primarily takes aim at an easy, soft target....casting its farcial eye at all the dreary conventions of today's action movies and their depressing similarity to first-person shooter video games. Cohen particularly gets a kick out of amping up the bloody collateral damage done to innocent bystanders to ridiculous levels. ("The Nice Guys" with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling makes a far funnier attempt at this same idea.)  Although you have admire his ingenuity in devising brutal sight gags involving pain inflicted on his bare ass, Cohen does nothing more than lazily slum around here...... it's an Adam Sandler-type paycheck grab.  While Sandler's content hitting the ceiling of lowlife comedy and staying there, we can only hope Sasha Baron Cohen has more ambitious things on his mind.  We'll shoot down "The Brothers Grimsby" with only 2 stars.

GIVE OUR DISREGARDS TO BROADWAY.....A FAMOUS SCREENWRITER ENDURES "THE SEASON" OF HIS DISCONTENT....

THE SEASON, by William Goldman remains, 46 years after its initial publication, a biting, intoxicatingly funny, bitchy read. Novelist Goldman had just begun to make his reputation as a star-quality screenwriter with his "Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid.'  He grew up loving theater and devoted "The Season" to an exhaustive, incisive look at both the art and business of Broadway plays and musicals. And what better way to do this than sit through every Broadway show that hit the footlights in the theater season of l967-1968.

As he enjoyed, endured and sometimes painfully grimaced through all the shows presented, Goldman, possessed of a withering wit and a rabid gossip's love of dirt, examined every aspect(and every personality type)  of what and who it takes to mount a Broadway show, He casts a sharp unforgiving eye on preening actors,struggling playwrights, hapless directors, power mad producers and all the peripheral hangers on (ticket scalpers, theater party bookers) who make up the New York theater food chain. Very few of them get away unscathed in Goldman's overview.

And why does Goldman take such great effort to apply his breezy vitriol to Broadway?  His book makes a devastating point.....while the country and its culture were enduring monumental upheavals during the mid to late 1960's, Broadway and its shows remained stagnantly mired in decades gone by, presenting the same sort of plays and musicals that had graced the Great White Way since the l940's. While 60's cinema was bursting with bright new diversive talent and a dazzling variety of subject matter, Broadway theater still trudged through written-in-stone imitations of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and hoary, arthritic comedies afflicted with stale gags and washed up Hollywood actors seeking refuge from their long gone film careers.

Not a pretty picture.....but Goldman, as he later does in his subsequent, equally sardonic books about his screenwriting career, sugar coats his impassioned rants with the chatty sarcasm of a brilliant raconteur. We loved the way he dished out scorn and a theater buff's loving enthusiasm in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence. . He's not above punching up his observations with gleeful, show-bizzy exaggeration......movie directors often complained his screenplays included impossibly over the top descriptions for them to follow, like,...."when they kiss, it's the greatest kiss ever in all movie history...."  Goldman finds a perfect subject for this kind of hyperbole in describing the embarrassing foibles of the '67/'68 theater offerings, such as the worthy, but ultimately star-crossed musical "Mata Hari". That show, a legendary flop, cemented its notorious status when Marisa Mell, the movie Euro-starlet playing Mata Hari. absent-mindedly wiped her nose after she'd been shot dead by a firing squad. Yikes, you might think....but you'd be surprised at the wise generosity with which Goldman treats the show itself and its creators, another reason we love this book and return to it again and again.

Since Beached Quill can't afford to take out a second mortgage to buy "Hamilton" tickets, we simply take "The Season" off our shelf for a re-read.....and it has everything you'd want in a hit show....laughter, drama, and thoughtful insight. We rate it a FIND OF FINDS...with a full 5 bright footlights.

IS THAT A BROADSWORD IN YOUR HAND OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME? WE DO BATTLE WITH "THE WAR LORD"

THE WAR LORD (1965) in its own strange little way, stands apart from the usual overblown 1960's clanging-swords-and armor costume epic. These films,featuring Charlton Heston clenching his jaw, along with vast collections of horses, crowds. castles and flaming arrows, usually filmed overseas in Spain or Italy ("Ben Hur", "El Cid", "55 Days In Peking", etc)  "The War Lord", however, didn't stray far from Los Angeles, shooting entirely on the back lot at Universal studios.

This strategic choice makes sense for the film, since it functions more as an overheated romantic drama that also happens to throw in Viking pirates, catapults and arrow-perforated stunt men hurling themselves off rickety battle towers.

Heston, ably doing his template signature character, the battle-hardened but conflicted epic hero, plays a Medieval knight charged by his boss, The Duke of whatever to seize and control some scrawny patch of coastal real estate. Why anyone wants this place is beyond me.....it features a lone prop department castle and a raggedy bunch of villagers who pay little attention to their priest (Maurice Evans) since they've all become orthodox Druids, dressing up as prancing chickens and goats at their official ceremonies, like weddings and such.)

But Heston's gotta do what Heston's gotta do, shlepping along his small army, including his grizzled, gruff mentor (the reliably grizzled and gruff Richard Boone) and his wild card jealous brother (Guy Stockwell, having a ball chewing the scenery.) Not long after parking themselves in the crumbling castle, a newly smitten Heston exercises his knightly privilege to pluck a Druid ingenue (Rosemary Forsyth) for sexual sampling on the eve of her wedding, This, needless to say, doesn't sit well with the Druid-babe's intended, her childhood BFF.(James Farantino) So Jimmy and the villagers round up the rampaging Viking guys, whose leader has a long standing beef with Heston,having slain Chuck's dad way back when....., and further aggravated by Heston and company having inadvertently captured the Barbarian Chief's toddler Prince..during their last clash. Yes, boys and girls....time to fire up the flaming arrows and check the spring action on the catapults.

Director Franklin Schaffner struggles to give this stuff a more literary, intimate sheen....but ultimately, it comes down to how many guys you get to see swan diving off the top of the castle with arrows stuck in their bellies. Without access to thousands of Spanish army recruits like the other competing epics of the time,  Schaffner  makes do with a moderately large company of Hollywood stunt men who put in a lot of Universal studio overtime falling, screaming, clutching their spear-pierced tummies and running around on fire.

The film does come with a nice bonus, though.....a superb score, both beautiful and rousing, by master movie composer Jerome Morross...also the composer  for William Wyler's "The Big Country" arguably one of the best movie scores ever written.

Okay, now that you know bloated costume battle epics are yet another Beached Quill guilty pleasure, we hold our ceremonial sword over this movie and dub it with 3 flaming arrows.

THE ITSY BITSY SPIDER CLIMBED UP THE BQ'S SHELF......WE SPRAY SOME QUILL-ICIDE ON 'THE HATCHING'

THE HATCHING by Ezekiel Boone aims to make your skin itch and crawl with its apocalyptic depiction of our world overrun by hordes of flesh eating spiders....wow, it's the world wide web for real.....

We'll say this much for "The Hatching".....the first two thirds of it is enjoyably creepy, gory and fast paced as it hops, skips and yes...skitters across a spider-ravaged globe.And then, as the book reached its final chapters, I lost all respect for this author.....cause it started to read as if he'd stopped writing and turned the book over to the publisher's marketing department for completion. The book finishes up with some skimpy,barely written scraps designed to make readers salivate for next book in what we now realize is a series, with the sequel due sometime in 2017. So instead of an ending, you get a trailer for the next book.

 Beached Quill memo to Ezekiel Boone....if you want people to stay with you for a potential series.....WRITE A WHOLE BOOK THE FIRST TIME OUT. Don't pass off on your readers nothing more than a slimy, corporate advertisement for your next book. Man up and write....you're supposed to function as the author, not the marketing team. There's a difference.

Ahhh, that was a fun rant. Beached Quill normally loves and adores rampaging bug stories, but the cynical calculation involved in this book's presentation made our skin crawl worse than the spiders. Sorry, but we spin only 1 1/2 webs. It's strictly an Arachna-phony.

A TRIO OF SMALL MOVIES FOR THE WEE HOURS......BQ WANDERS THROUGH A LATE NITE TOUR OF INDEPENDENT FILMS ON CABLE.....

3 in the morning and our itchy fingers busily work the FIOS remote, scrolling through a dense forest of little movies that probably no one outside of the Middle-Of-Nowhere Film Festival heard of.....

SAFELIGHT (2015) Crippled-from-birth teen, an aspiring photographer, is befriended by the 18 year old hooker who plies her trade at the truck stop near the convenience store he clerks at.  As you might expect in an independent film, a gentle, tender friendship develops, overshadowed by the girl's pimp, a raving, violent nutcase, annoyingly over-acted by some actor we won't even bother naming. He's that bad, dripping flop sweat as he struggles to outdo every previous movie psycho-pimp  Typically for an Indie, the film ends abruptly, leaving you with more questions than answers. 2 stars

TAKE ME TO THE RIVER (2015) Gay California teen boy plans to come out to his family during their trip to a relatives get together picnic in Nebraska. Things go quickly awry when it appears to the family that he may (or may not) have molested his 10 year old niece while they were alone together in the barn. Arid, quietly creepy and unsettling, the film revels in its inconclusiveness, hidden motives and deep family secrets left unexplained. By the time this uneasy little anecdote grinds to a halt, you'll wonder what the hell went on and why you even bothered to care,   1 1/2 stars.

ONE MORE TIME (2015)  A washed up, Sinatra-type crooner (Christopher Walken) plots a comeback as he gathers round his dysfunctional family, all of them wounded in some form or another by his lifetime of self-absorption, emotional neglect and string of broken marriages. Hardest hit : one of his daughters (Amber Heard) an unstable 31 year old would-be singer songwriter and random sex addict who's just been kicked out of her apartment. Easily the most watchable of the three films discussed here....Heard and Walken's acidic verbal clashes keep it interesting, and you have to love Walken's slightly satiric recreations of those signature Sinatra/Tony Bennet swingin' song stylings. You'll wish it had a little more oomph to raise it slightly above the usual remote observational mood of independent films. 2 and 1/2 stars.

PUCKER UP, HOLIDAY LOVERS! BQ STANDS NOT UNDERNEATH, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH TO MISTLETOE....THE MISTLETOE BOOKS BY RICHARD PAUL EVANS!

We unabashedly admit to wallowing in the whole onslaught of Christmas merchandising.....it NEVER gets old for us, no matter how manipulative and corny. The music? All hail Andy Williams, happy purveyor of "The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year." The movies?  Deck the TV with round the clock Hallmark Christmas movies....(which we promise to cover soon). Even the commercials....where Santa and his elves work tirelessly to sell us toys, clothing. new cars and chicken McNuggets......bring 'em on.  Beached Quill finds it all theraputic and as comforting as an extra blanket on a frosty winter night.

For holiday reading, the season's incomplete until you've inhaled (usually at one sitting) the charming little "Mistletoe" romances penned annually by Richard Paul Evans. He's up to three of them now and they're virtually identical in plot and formula.....which is why we embrace them. Each year, it's like breaking open and gorging on a box of red-and-green Dunkin Donuts. Basically, a Lonely Guy and a Lonely Girl (yes, they have names, but we'll simply refer to them as such), both shell shocked survivors of assorted divorces of toxic ex-mates, find each other and true love during the holidays.,

THE MISTLETOE SECRET has Lonely Guy enraptured by Lonely Girl's blog, in which she bemoans her fate as...as Lonely Girl. Lonely Guy, having no idea about her identity, sets out to track her down, travelling from his Daytona Beach home to Lonely Girl's tiny town in the middle of frigid Utah. Complications ensue, as Lonely Guy keeps knocking on the wrong doors in his quest, but....oh no, I dare not spoil the rest......

THE MISTLETOE PROMISE, has already been adapted as a Hallmark channel movie, This one presents a Lonely Guy and Lonely Girl so besieged by the social demands of the busy holiday season, that they make a pact to pose as each other dates at the many functions and parties they're obligated to attend. Before long, Lonely Guy and Lonely Girl succumb to the close proximity they've put each other in...and before you can say 'Joy To The World, the two of them.....no, no, our lips are sealed....

THE MISTLETOE INN places Lonely Guy and Lonely Girl, both aspiring writers, together at a writer's retreat in a snowy, picture postcard Vermont inn.(Which is why you'd never see these books taking place in Key West or Aruba....)  Lonely Girl hopes to meet the retreat's premier guest speaker, a reclusive romance writer but in the meantime she falls for Lonely Guy, another would be writer who harbors secrets of his own, including........ooops.....almost made the naughty list by spilling it.....

If the holidays frazzle you to the point of madness....we can't recommend these gems enough to calm you down, soothe your soul and maybe even make you tolerate the TV spots where Santa pitches used Suburus......they go down as smoothly as hot chocolate or pumpkin lattes....the books, we mean, not the cars. BQ jingles the bells for this series, giving them the FIND OF FINDS....and 5 bright red ornaments.......

STRANGLERS IN THE NIGHT.....EXCHANGING GLANCES......ANOTHER GRISLY GRABBER WHERE THERE'S MORE THAN MEETS THE FBI.

ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS by J.T.Ellison.  We'll admit, when it comes to mysteries, BQ rarely picks up what they call 'police procedurals'. Yes I know....zillions of readers dearly love these, following the cops as they painstakingly, doggedly sift through clue after clue, stumble as they follow false leads pointing them in the wrong direction.....but ultimately connect the dots and corner the killer. For us, it comes down to how well the author conceives the sleuths......whether the cops are straight arrows or drunken burn-outs, it comes down to this....are these people we want to spend any time with and do we really care if they finally catch whoever's leaving dead bodies on the road every three days?

The dynamic duo in Ellison's thriller didn't exactly thrill us with any special quirks or qualities.....we found them standard issue, like two characters awaiting their own "Law And Order" spinoff series. Nashville Homicide Detective Taylor Jackson, a tall, gorgeous blonde, conveniently co-habits with FBI profiler John Baldwin as they jointly hunt down the 'Southern Strangler'.  The 'SS' keeps them busy as he abducts and strangles the numerous pretty girls of the book's title, then chops their hands off and leaves the hands in the vicinity of his next victim....whose missing hands will next appear....well, you get it, right?.

What lifts this book above the pack of procedurals and kept us reading til the end.....its plot, not the cops. . Ellison intersects the strangler's trackdown with the tangled lives of twin sisters who share a dark, disturbing history....having been kidnapped and sexually assaulted when they were 12 years old. As the puzzle unravels and the killer unmasked, the turn of events turns genuinely twisted and ultimately heartbreaking. You expect satisfying solutions in a book like this..Ellison makes good enough on the delivery that we wouldn't mind checking out his next effort......BQ arrests this one with a gruesomely good 2 1/2 stars, (And we used great restraint in not saying something like "hands down, it's top notch!"  Ooops....)