"Thinner Than a Pringle Chip And Infinitely Less Organized Than A Canful" or "When Good Houseplants Go Very, Very Bad"

Rating: 1/10 (14 June 2008)

I have to type fast because this morning I cast a mocking glance upon one of my houseplants and with the noontime wind beginning to gather momentum on the crests of nearby hills, I naturally have oodles of utterly vague and impulsive illogical "plans" to head for, um, the hills to escape its plantarly wrath; little time to compose a coherent summary of this "work". Kind of like its director when same was scrawled onto the back of a Starbucks napkin from whence it, on the merits of its obvious brilliance (cough) rocketed directly to production.
For cult-viewers who may have tired of rewatching _Striptease_ every Friday night for the last 12 years, here you have it! Talentless body-doubles for Demi Moore and Rumer Willis, amazingly enough at low-budget prices! During the interminable shot of Zooey Deschanel doing a series of, was it about 800?, eyeball widenings, a small part of me wondered if this was to be a comedy, and I patiently waited for Leslie Nielsen to emerge with a Roundup mister from behind, say, Betty Buckley playing a wrinkled old hippie with daisies in her hair.
Alas, it was not to be.
Neither were *any* of my lowest expectations. Amongst its many failures as a movie worth $20 and 2 hours of my valuable time, let's examine its complete and utter incompetence in the realm of character development. Had Mark Wahlberg even *cared* that Zooey Deschanel was having an affair (or if she even *were* having one!), perhaps we might have been impressed with their later reconciliation. Nope.
Holes in the plot? Two words: "Alpine Lace Cheese".
One example from the many dozens I'm sure I could cite would be why new-mom and new-dad let little Rumer wander around in the ex-Betty Buckley's house - o - anachronistic - horrors knowing that her recently and extensively mutilated body lay just around the corner nestled comfortably on the residual shards of broken glass in one of those charming cottage-y windows.
Even so, couldn't they have at least gone with the so-clichéd traumatized - youngster - remains - mute - and - later - launches - sequel - esquire - subplot? Might I add that it would have been the work-of-a-moment to give Buckley's character a quaint love of plants (so we could feel indignant when they later carved her into little pieces), but no.
Speaking of Ms. Buckley, what in the sex-bot-heck was that frigging doll doing on her bed anyway? Come to think of it, I don't want to know.
Meanwhile, my message to MNS: that "Make An R Movie With Absolutely No R-Rated Shots" free-ware you downloaded that promised to auto-gen screenplays with all kinds of quirky don't-go-anywhere mini-plots and bare-bones dialogue was a PRANK, a prank, I tell you. We're talking about a hideous agoraphobic and osteoporosis-riddled joke.
You've been had, latte-boy. Kinda like everyone who watched the promising previews of this move, then wasted an evening's entertainment on the swill you somehow, criminally, felt was worthy of full-scale release.
At least we're extracting our money's worth in the pruning of it. As topiary, I estimate there's just about enough here for a Happy-Meal-sized Loch Ness creature, possibly minus the head and neck. Well, maybe the torso, but for sure the tail. We could do the tail.