The last lesbian commune on the left

Fearnet: your source for shitty, free horror films! Provided you have OnDemand and are bored. Very, very bored. Or are such a huge horror film fan that you don't give a damn about what you're watching.

As I've said before, I'm a fan of the horror genre. I'll take it where I can get it, be it rad, original Asian horror, low-rent but high-on-the-scares American 1970s horror or low-rent and amazingly stupid American remake of rad, original Asian horror. Whatever. I'm a sucker.

So, when the the re-imagining (if you will) of Friday the 13th was released, I checked out the original on Fearnet for funzies. This year's version is, by the way, effing terrible. I hadn't seen the original in a long while, and wanted to refresh my memory for the remake/re-imagining/crapfest that is the 2009 version. NO NEED, as it turns out! It's just that bad!

While we were sitting through the endless crapfest of previews for the new F13, we saw a preview for a remake of The Last House on the Left. Now, if you've been in front of a tv at all in the last few weeks, you know it's due in theaters on March 13.

Cue Fearnet! As always, Fearnet is out makin' that dolla and for a few hot minutes, they were running the real thang: Wes Craven's 1972 gorefest The Last House on the Left.

I watched! I couldn't help myself. As a young 'mo, my parents would never let me rent LHH, even though they let me rent pretty much every other awful, bloody '80s horror film out there. You know what? They were probably being quite sensible. Remind me to call my mom and tell her exactly that, ok?

The 1972 LHH is ... something. Here's a fun fact from IMDB: one of the film's alternate titles was Sex Crime of the Century. Let's amend that shall we? Dyke Sex Crime of the Century! Or maybe Forced Ladyparts Rape, like it's a weird Japanese porn.

Synopsis: A high school chick goes out with her friend to the Big City to see a concert for her birthday. As they head to the show, a radio report reveals that some Dangerous Men have escaped from prison. In the Big City, the chicks attempt to buy some "grass" from one of the Dangerous Men. Mayhem ensues. And by Mayhem, I mean death. And lesbian rape. And forced lesbian copulation. And also regular, heterosexual rape. Also, someone's peen is bitten off by an angry woman. Also drugs! Also a silly, happy score accompanies this whole thing! After that, revenge! And that guy who played the angry karate instructor ("Sweep the leg!") in The Karate Kid is in it!

If you come away with anything about the original, it's one thing: lesbian rape. The IMDB FAQ for the film even includes this question: "Why isn't the forced lesbian scenes in any release?" I mean, awesome. Good question. Not "Why is this film a sack of shit?" or "Why the fucking hell did anyone sit through this?"

And now this: I'm terribly curious to see if the remake (due any day now!) includes, you know, any of the violent lady-on-lady sexual assault that the original included. There's also a character in the original who apparently turned into a big 'mo while her boyfriend was in prison. Will we see that?

Here's my guess: fucking absolutely no way on earth. Here's another guess: the new version of LHH will somehow, some way end up being WORSE than the original.

Who's with me?

I'm thinking of buying some new art

There's been a ton of chatter about the Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman film about the first post-op male to female transsexual. Nicky is set to play Einar Wegener (who becomes Lili Elbe) and Charlie is set to play Einar's wife, Gerda. This all takes place in the 1930s and I hope this film doesn't flop like a flounder.

But what is way more interesting is Gerda's hot, hot lesbian art. Check it out over at Dorothy Surrenders but be warned it is very much NSFW. Though, it would make a darn swell screensaver. The tie for my favorite goes to the hoopskirt adventure and the fingerfucking on the bed.

Queer love for the biopic

Months ago I read about Gus Van Sant's Harvey Milk biopic "Milk." Milk was the first openly gay duder elected to political office in San Francisco in the late 70s. It's on my list to see at the theater, and it comes out December 5. I love, love, love movies about real-life gays like WHOA.
So who's with me? I'll buy the popcorn. You get the Milk Duds.

'Boys Don't Cry' killer in death row pickle

Regardless of how you feel about capital punishment and how those are set to die on death row, this story on CNN about John Lotter is interesting because:


"TECUMSEH, Nebraska (AP) -- For more than 10 years, John Lotter has faced death in Nebraska's electric chair for the grisly 1993 triple murder that spawned the movie "Boys Don't Cry." But the state Supreme Court made that sentence uncertain for Lotter and the nine other men on death row in its February ruling that electrocution — Nebraska's only means of execution — is cruel and unusual punishment."

(If you don't remember three people dying in the film, you're correct. They only portray two, Brandon Teena and Lisa Lambert. Philip Devine, Lana's sister Leslie's boyfriend, also was murdered. He wasn't included in the film at all.)

Speaking of big Ds

Okay, so I finally got a chance to see Cloverfield this weekend after a full week of whining to Punk Rock Femme about how I rillyrillyrilly wanted to see it and how it would be The Greatest Movie Ever. It was going to be a monster film for the 00s, or the second coming of The Blair Witch Project, right?

Not so much.

It was kind of ehhhhhhhh. I tuned out about halfway through it and spent my time snarking to PRF about various stuff. I know how to ruin a movie for people if I don't like it!

Still, there was a character in Cloverfield that caught my eye and PRF's eye. Marlena! She's sort of heavily featured in the pre-gigantic-amounts-of-action buildup in a way that makes you think that she'll be a big deal later (and she kind of is. Spoiler! Boom!).

PRF and I both agreed that she looked really familar. At one point, I remember saying that she looked familiar not in the "have I seen her in another film" (that film would be Mean Girls, incidentally) way but in the "it's possible that I've met her somewhere" way. And I just figured it out.

Marlena looks like Shane from The L Word. It's not that I maybe met the actress who played Marlena at some random house party, it's that she totally looks like a girly, Brooklyn hipster version of Shane. She even has lady Shane hair!

Don't believe me? Check out the video at DreadCentral. Shane. With just a touch more eye makeup.

The truth about something or other, but it's not sex

I'm watching The Truth About Female Desire right now. If the intro is to be believed, then I am in for some kind of campy '70s sitcom about SECKS. There are lots of female symbols floating around, horn music, and various doin'-it-related words rolling about behind photos of the cast members. One of the words? Clitoris. It's really the only one you need to know.

The music is so gawdawful and porny.

The voiceover promises a wide variety of sexual orientations (including "swingers"!) in the group of 8 women who make up the study group. Remains to be seen, but all of the participants are young, thin, and feminine. It's like The Real World, even down to a pimped out apartment, but In The Interest Of Science.

Next: drunken conversations about sex! The introduction of the study team from the Kinsey Institute! The shocking revelation that sexuality studies don't really care too much about women's sexuality! Or even women!

Speaking of women, we have:

- Amy: 23, straight, busted grill, haver of dirty public bus sex.

(And this is intercut with an experiment involving mapping the clitoris with a cool, underwater camera. Surprise: sometimes it's a really tough thing to find.)

- Hannah: 25, straight, sneaky masturbator.

(And here the doctor who is performing the experiment refers to the clitoris as "the part." Nice!)

Blahblahblah, swelling, clitoris, swelling, image maps. Penis drawings. Blahblahblah.

Lots of stupid, probably drunken conversations about heterosex. There is an annoying American women who is annoying and American. Aging vaginas. "Vulva." Plaster casts of vajayjays done by a super-cute, punk rock sculptor.

- Julie: 23, straight, constantly horny but incredibly boring.

- Carlene: 38, straight, married, 5 billion children.

Porn! Women like it! Or not! Carlene? Realllllly likes porn.

Revelation: women are sometimes bisexual. The producers had to get the participants drunk to get them to admit this. Also, Kinsey scaling!

- Kaz: 22, lesbo with shocking lip piercing.

Second revelation: sometimes women get turned on by things that don't match their sexual orientation. Or their species. Just sayin'.

Carlene: kind of a whore.

Blahblahblah, fertility, attraction to men, blahblah, spotting attractiveness of men by touching, that thing about testosterone and finger length.

- Charlie: 26, straight. Surprise.

- Emma: 26, straight. Yawn.

Masculinity, testosterone, symmetry. Kaz shows a preference for masculine features, and we go into some kind of effed up bullshit about gender. The word "femme" shows up.

Inhibition! Fantasy! Dirty porno music! Alcohol: it makes the ladies into whores.

- Andrea: 28, and I'm gonna guess heterosexual.

Drugs! Pheromones! Sexual depressants! Evil trickery regarding the placebo effect.

Submission fantasies ... gah.

Annnnnd: part 4, orgasms. The lesbian has the best description EVER. G-Spot! Ejaculation! Hollllllaaaaaa!

--

Well, there you go. 4 hours of a rigid documentary about sex condensed into a nice wall of text. If you've ever had sex with women, or thought about having sex with women a lot, or have read a book about women who have sex, or ARE a woman: total waste of 4 hours of your life.

10xfast: watchin' the bad documentaries so you don't have to do it yourself!

The Truth About What Straight Women Want

I'm currently downloading a documentary called The Truth About Female Desire. It showed up on television in the UK in 2005, and it's now available for download via the wonderful world of torrents.

Here's the description:

In a major science event led by John Bancroft, six single girls share a dormitory at Brunel University, London, where scientists from the Kinsey Institute perform sexual experiments on them to determine the true nature of female desire.

It's now 100 years since Freud first speculated about female sexuality but with the new technology available today we are closer to working out what makes female sexuality so mysterious. Over the course of a week, a group of real life Carrie Bradshaws, Samanthas, Charlottes and Mirandas will have the adventure of a lifetime as they take part in a series of cutting edge experiments to work out what makes their libidos tick.

Ooh, Daddy! Female desire! References to Sex and the City! Some kind of mystery! Small sample sizes! Crazy brief testing period! This will be gooooooood.

Unfortunately, there's also this:

Fact will be separated from fiction as the scientists discover whether there is really a g-spot, why women are attracted to certain men, whether it is possible to tell whether a man is going to be good in bed and what the real turn ons and turn off are from a female perspective.

Oh. Men. Great. So, it's more like The Truth About Female Desire If You Consider Female Desire To Be Pretty Much Heterosexual. Also, Lesbians? Haven't Heard Of 'Em. They Probably Don't Even Watch Sex and the City Anyway.

I fully intend to watch and report back, since I'm helpless in the face of any kind of documentary. The download speeds I'm getting on the torrent are hellishly slow, so it might take a while. I'm a trooper though.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Well, if they're going to see it ...

Feministing says that IBTC is some sort of must see, and I still can't get behind that.

Maybe when it opens in theaters on the East Coast (never!)/comes out on DVD, I can watch it again in the company of like-minded folks (instead of watching on my laptop, by myself, while getting increasingly surly about unrelated issues) and feel differently. Until then, I squint suspiciously in your direction, J. Babs ...

Repellent

Bug creeped me out in about 27 different ways, but Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon can sure act the fuck out of two people going mad. While I have a few questions about plot (Lloyd, the son; Dr. Sweet; ex-husband shit) it's the Hopping Lesbian Bar in the first half of the movie that intrigued me. Judd's character, Agnes, works as a waitress there, along with her best (lesbian) friend, R.C. and the two share a few "moments" onscreen, but where on Earth is there nothingness in the middle of Oklahoma and yet, one highly populated Les Bar? Cuz I lives in D.C. and there's only one.