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Reviews
The Time Machine (I Found at a Yardsale) (2011)
Utterly Abysmal, The Lowest of the Low
It should already speak volumes that the IMDb rating for this title is nearly as low as can be mathematically possible (1.1, as of May 2019), considering that users on this site cannot rate anything below a single star, and several other reviewers have already said plenty about how much of an understatement the description "dreadfully terrible" can be.
What really unnerves me, though, is the production title card from some (alleged) studio calling itself the "Actors' Theatre Production Company." Setting aside all of this movie's other numerous faults, failures, crimes, and shortcomings, that production title card (which is the first thing that anybody who'd dare to ever watch this movie would set their eyes upon) gives the impression that this is a vehicle for regional, aspiring ACTORS.
"Sure," I think to myself, "I'm not exactly going to be seeing Sir Lawrence Olivier or Meryl Streep in this thing, but at least the performers on screen would be giving a try, if only for their own sake." I mean, would I be crazy to assume that the good people with the "Actors' Theatre Production Company" would have any regard for ACTING?
Well, surprise! Unless the "Actor's Theatre Production Company" actually happens to be a non-profit whose mission statement is to provide acting gigs for asocial individuals with mental deficiencies and no previous theatre experience, this company couldn't even competently put on a community production of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."
The acting alone defies comparison to any other "legendarily bad" movie anyone can name. Never before have I seen two people (Johnny James Gatyas and Amy Henry) on screen look less convincing as human beings and lack as much personal chemistry. At least the likes of Tommy Wiseau or even Neil Breen can make an honest attempt at conveying an authentic emotion or make an on-screen "connection" with their cast mates. Here, however, that is a luxury which this film's $3,500 budget cannot afford.
The principal cast of ''The Time Machine (I Found at a Yardsale)'' cannot possibly be comprised of people who have any interest trying to act (for stage or screen), and they cannot even be bothered to hide that fact. About the only person in this entire movie who appears to be an authentic performer is a belly dancer (A belly dancer!), and even she's not worth looking at.
Treat this movie as toxic waste and keep far away before you start growing tumors on your thyroid.
420 Awards: The First Annual Awards Show Event (2019)
Fraud
Derek Savage couldn't even figure out how to set up an online livestream for "420 Awards," let alone find advertisers who could pay to put this on television.
This so-called "2019 TV Special" was not broadcast in any capacity. By any reasonable metric, not getting a "2019 TV Special" actually on television is a massive failure on the part of the producers and everyone involved in making this outcome possible.
Think of the worst TV special you've ever seen aired on television. Whatever that is, at least it had enough cash and organization to actually be seen by home audiences. This "2019 TV Special" couldn't even find a home on basic cable.
The biggest joke of all though is that a proclaimed "Internet Movie Database" would still catalogue a non-existent "2019 TV Special" as an authentic media project as if it were the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards. With standards this low, anytime anybody books a small theater for a company presentation, we can pretend they deserve credit for "directing" it, as if their name was Spielberg.
Cool Cat Stops a School Shooting: A School Safety Film
Jam-packed with Unexpected Surprises
Following hot on the heels of writer/director/producer Derek Savage's most personal project, "Gun Self-Defense for Women," a powerful ode to romanticizing firearms and the NRA culture, Savage unexpectedly turns everything on its head in a series of shocking twists.
Beginning at a backyard birthday party for Cool Cat where all his school classmates are invited, Daddy Derek first strikes up a conversation with the father of Butch the Bully. Butch's father recently got his 10-year-old son his own personal gun, and Daddy Derek is happy to hear about this, as it warmly reminds him of the age when Derek got his first gun from his own parents and firmly believes that every 10-year-old should possess a gun. Later on during the party, as Cool Cat is unwrapping his presents, Daddy Derek gifts to his anthropomorphic feline son his own semi-automatic rifle, which Cool Cat finds very "cool."
After the party is over, Daddy Derek tells Cool Cat that it is better if all people carry their own guns for protection in this "crazy world," as police and law enforcement are totally unreliable and can't be depended to stop the "bad guys" for oneself.
However, everything spins out of control the very next day at school, as Butch the Bully brought his gun to school, and being a bully he decides to kill his math teacher. Her head explodes like a melon at a Gallagher stage show. Butch the Bully subsequently blows away Erik Estrada, Vivica A. Fox, Cool Cat's best friend Maria, and everyone else in the math class while laughing maniacally and exclaiming how he loves to be a bully.
Cool Cat, remembering what Daddy Derek told him, produces his semi-automatic rifle from his backpack and tries to confront Butch the Bully, but without any proper training and without ever facing a crisis scenario like this before, he accidentally mows down multiple innocent children running through the school hallways when he thinks he's spotted the shooter. Police arriving on the scene subsequently gun down and kill Cool Cat when they immediately see him as an aggressor.
Finally, in the most powerful scene of all, Daddy Derek arrives at the school (after hearing about reports of a shooting on the news) and tries to do exactly what Cool Cat attempted. Daddy Derek also accidentally kills the wrong kid that he initially mistakes for the shooter before Butch the Bully appears behind him and shoots Daddy Derek in the knees. Dropped to all fours and reduced to tears, Daddy Derek's gets laughed at by Butch the Bully as he then has his way with humiliating Daddy Derek by forcibly shoving his own handgun up Daddy Derek's rectum. The last words Daddy Derek hears before Butch pulls his trigger and kills him are, "Oh yeah, the police killed Cool Cat, too."
Then, in one final twist, Butch the Bully plants his own gun on Daddy Derek, and the police end up blaming both Cool Cat and Daddy Derek for the entire incident. As they were the only ones that police and authorities saw shooting people, and as they can't speak in their own defense when dead, everyone considers the case closed, and Butch the Bully gets away scot free and easily becomes one of the greatest criminal masterminds in cinema history.
The moral that I learned here is that everything Derek Savage said in his earlier documentary "Gun Self-Defense for Women" is utter garbage, as his and Cool Cat's handling of firearms only made a bigger mess of things and made them out to look like villains. Being a gun-toting NRA nutbag with delusional dreams of becoming a national hero by trying to "stop" a school-shooting and confront the shooter is only a recipe for disaster.
This may not have been what I was ever expecting to see from a cracked mind like Derek Savage's, but this is easily his finest work to date. The only reason I don't give this a perfect 10 is for the needlessly explicit nudity and vulgar depiction of the orifice invasion detailed in Daddy Derek's death scene.
Gun Self-Defense for Women (2016)
Cool Cat Loves You, But Daddy Derek Wants to Shoot You
This video is as useful as a bullet in the head, and appropriately enough, before the opening title, "writer"/producer/director/camera operator/editor/host Derek Savage points his gun directly at the camera and "shoots" his viewers straight in the face.
Mr. Savage has no business being in front of a camera instructing viewers on ANY subject, but in his own mind he's a knowledgeable "expert" who can talk at length on gun safety and self-defense because, he tells us, (1) he's owned a gun since he was 10-years-old (how could that even be legal?) and (2) he's worked in "the machine gun business" (on which he gives no specifics to clarify what this even means or why anyone should care).
Much of Savage's time on screen is spent either stirring panic and raising alarm that "crime and home invasions are on the rise"--without citing any data or empirical studies and choosing to leave it up to his viewers to figure out for themselves why there are higher rates of crime in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago (IDK, maybe it has something to do with a vastly higher population density than Cornfield, Iowa???)--or feeding his own ego by showing off his various guns and toys as if he's hoping for the slightest excuse to use them and justify causing grievous bodily harm (Again, he wants we the viewers to stare down his gun barrel before he pulls the trigger on more than one occasion).
It's less about learning "gun self-defense" and proper gun etiquette and more about Derek Savage making himself feel powerful and important. (Best exemplified when he derails everything to just pride himself on being "The Creator of Cool Cat", as well as in a POV camera shot that's intended to be a "mailman's" visual perspective which would in fact place the figure at waist-level with Mr. Savage, as if the mailman were on his knees and gazing up to the "godlike" figure that Derek wants others to see him as... or as if he gets his mail delivered by Peter Dinklage)
In one of the most telling moments about Mr. Savage's mindset and dreams of dispensing Charles Bronson-styled vigilante justice, he produces a poster of mass shooter Dylann Roof, which he says he selected for target practice "for all of (his) black brothers and sisters out there." Apparently, Mr. Savage is totally unaware of the media attention that the families and loved ones of Roof's victims received when offering their forgiveness during Roof's criminal hearing because that was the powerfully Christian thing for them to do after what had happened in their church. The irony of Savage wishing he could have personally exerted lethal force on Roof in the name of his victims, in spite of the loftier example that they had set in NOT giving into wrathful temptation and NOT wishing any more harm could come to anybody--not even a complete monster--is completely lost on him.
Elsewhere, Derek Savage associates himself with a woman who intimidates FedEx drivers with electrical prods, a woman who claims to be "pro-police" but does nothing except criticize their effectiveness in order to justify the supposed need for personal firearms, right-wing talk radio bobble head Heidi Harris, and a woman who says she had successfully fended off an attacker without the aid of a firearm who Derek Savage suggests would have still been better off if she had kept a loaded gun lying in plain view on her car's front passenger seat.
From a technical production standpoint, this is an even bigger mess. Audio levels and sound quality varies from scene-to-scene and second-to-second, and edits are often disorienting and conspicuous. In one instance, the simple sentence, "One time I heard you talking about a cocktail waitress" is conveyed with an audio and camera cut on every other word. And near the end, when a firearms instructor invites Derek Savage to speak to his class, Savage is seen standing up, about to make some kind of statement... and then in mid-sentence there's sharp cut to Mr. Savage saying the class is running late and he doesn't want to take up any more time. Then what was even the point of showing ANY of that? Even more outlandishly, this segment on the firearms course is introduced WHILE Derek Savage is driving his car to the event itself, frequently taking his eyes off the road ahead of him to speak directly to his camera propped on the dashboard. A personal introduction to this segment could have been recorded any time for this documentary, even after it was already filmed, without needlessly endangering the lives of other drivers on the streets of Las Vegas. Don't drink & drive, don't text & drive, and certainly don't film your own DVD vanity projects & drive.
If anyone is only interested in this for a glimpse of Cool Cat, expect to be disappointed. Outside of "Daddy Derek" taking a moment to blatantly advertise his Cool Cat merchandise to the few people watching this who haven't yet had the "privilege" to learn about that godawful travesty, Cool Cat's only exposure in this is in re-used material carried over from Derek Savage's previous film. However, if you're somehow able to get through this entire video, prepare to be completely baffled by the start of the end credits.
Dragon Day (2013)
So Bad It's Good, an Absolute HOWLER!
Oh man, any 'Simpsons' fans here remember that Y2K Halloween short where even a MILK CARTON goes wonky because "it contains a computer chip," just like everything else? This movie just about stretches the same goofy generalizations as the basis for its own premise while neglecting the fact that it works best as a JOKE and complete FARCE. They expect to be taken seriously here.
This film's chief assertion is that EVERYTHING containing a computer chip is "Made in China", and the Chinese have pretty much been preparing to one day destroy America through these chips ever since Richard Nixon's visit to the country in the early 1970's.
Even the Samsung Galaxy smartphone that was manufactured in South Korea, which I'm currently typing up this review on, contains nonexistent Chinese components that both the filmmakers and conspiracy theorists lapping all this up want to believe could one day cripple America. "Plausible, intriguing premise," my butt!
If anybody truly believes in this movie's nonsense, rest assured that the biggest portion of US debt is created by national defense spending (which, thankfully, is not outsourced to China) and using the production output from those sectors to continue fighting pointless wars in desert. China has no reason to get involved in our debt when they can just sit back and wait for the US military industrial complex to collapse and eat itself.
And don't even get me started on the goddamn wristbands...
I haven't had so much fun ripping into a film's sincerest efforts to be taken seriously with so many logically unsound premises since I first watched 'Johnny Mnemonic'. This movie really is THAT idiotic.
Chastity Bites (2013)
The Left-Wing Political Equivalent of a Christian Movie (and misguidedly failing even at THAT)
"Chastity Bites" is the sort of incomplete film that attempts to criticize "abstinence only" sex education, while completely forgetting to even ONCE bring up any valid alternatives.
This presents a fundamental problem with the film's stance on this very issue, where a story about Elizabeth Bathory exploiting "abstinence only" education programs for her evil gain is only countered with the advocacy of teenage girls having sex (with men, very importantly-- more on that in a moment), without once mentioning obvious terms like "condom", "birth control", "safe sex", or "avoiding unwanted pregnancy". No, this film thinks it's just fine for teens (young women, especially) to have sex without having a care for any of that stuff,
Tying into this "pro-sex, sans any valuable sex education" theme is a misguided aim to portray itself as "pro-feminist", while the most crucial parts of the plot's resolution aren't even remotely feminist to begin with.
First, there's the notion that, before our "feminist" protagonist can defeat Elizabeth Bathory, it is IMPERATIVE for her to lie down and surrender herself to a male in order to receive something from the opposite gender, which the story suggests all women would otherwise be lacking. How progressive. This further stresses dubious importance on heterosexual intercourse above all other forms of love and sexuality (which also comes with the implication of turning our so-called "bisexual" female protagonist into someone who is only seen getting romantically involved with a man), as well as implies that it was the dumb, meatheaded MEN who were in the right all along when they complained to the "prep girls- turned-abstinence advocates" for deciding to refuse to have sex with them (without condoms).
Later, after our female protagonist has received her lover's male essence, we reach the story's climax where our so-called "feminist" hero is handed a SPEAR, and uses this very obvious symbol of male power to penetrate the primary antagonist for using her femininity to promote the rejection of masculinity. After witnessing this, we are boldly told by the film, "This is what a feminist looks like"—meaning "a female who takes on the qualities of a man (Male Action Hero, more precisely) and succeeds all thanks to her acquired maleness", because forget Girl Power; REAL proud, independent women need to behave more like MEN!
In all good conscience, this concluding message shouldn't be called "feminism". I'd call it "misguided".
Similarly, our male lead character who is intended to fit the movie's "ideal" of the "perfect man" is an emo flake who reads feminist literature. Along with the female hero, the result is the common archetypes of the Male Action Hero and the Ineffectual Female Love Interest having their genders reversed while both archetypes otherwise function exactly the same as they always have. The film likely sees this as an attempt at being "edgy" and "different" and "challenging norms", but the result on screen makes both these characters WORSE than when these same tired clichés are played straight.
And if anyone was supposed to be won over by the male lead's left-wing political ideals, the film immediately fails to achieve this the moment they introduce this character in his first scene wearing a goddamn Che Guevara T-shirt. This supposedly "smart" character that other intelligent, young women are expected to appreciate (we're led to believe) gains no credibility by donning the archetypal iconography of left-wing revolution that's long been appropriated to feed a capitalist machine. Any comparison to the proud female protagonist who more conceivably thinks for herself is further damaged by the man's later reference of the "Occupy" movement. His left-wing revolutionary attitudes are shaped by mainstream fads and commercial trends and reduced to overused icons and buzzwords that no longer have any meaning, after the System they were intended to rebel against stole their sting.
Initially, I thought this male character was actually being set up to betray the female hero. Right from the start, he came off looking like he was exploiting "pseudo-rebellion" and social trends and movements as a means of selfishly taking something for himself from the more principled protagonist (i.e. her virginity), not much different than Elizabeth Bathory's manipulation of other women. Without being made out to be another villain in the later half of the film, though, the male lead still just comes off as a completely unlikable, mindless tool that our "feminist" hero is all the more stupid for paying him any attention.
Cool Cat Saves the Kids (2015)
Cool Cat Loves You!
Don't let any bullies out there try and shape your judgment on this gem of a title.
Some people really don't have anything better to do, except trash a great movie with annoying 1-star votes and spread lies on the Internet about how "dumb" Cool Cat is.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn if much of the unwarranted negativity hurled at this movie is coming from people who haven't even watched this movie for themselves in the first place. Those people are no worse than the Butch the Bully, the film's repulsive antagonist.
As it just so happens, one of the main points of "Cool Cat Saves the Kids" is in addressing the attitudes of mean naysayers who try to demean others who strive to bring good attitudes and fun vibes into people's lives. The message to be learned here is that if one is friendly and good to others, the world is friendly and good to one in return, and that is cool. Conversely, if one is miserable and leaving 1-star votes on IMDb, one is alone and doesn't have any friends at all. Ain't that the truth?
The world has uncovered a great, new, young filmmaking talent in "Cool Cat" creator Derek Savage, and I sure hope that this is only the first of many amazing films and stories that the world has yet to appreciate.
If you are a cool person who likes to have lots of fun, I guarantee that this is a movie with charm that will uplift your spirits and reaffirm your positive attitudes towards life.
Treehouse (2014)
Incomplete Movie
This shouldn't be considered an ending spoiler simply because THERE IS NO ENDING TO SPEAK OF.
'Treehouse' only tells 2/3rds of a story, and when the movie reaches what should be the beginning of a concluding 3rd Act, the filmmakers simply do not provide one.
After suggesting a final confrontation with an anonymous, flabby, mute teenager with no personality to speak of--a conflict which could be resolved in less than ten minutes of screen time after the protagonists spontaneously arm themselves with assault rifles--the movie just STOPS. No confrontation, no climax, no resolution or denouement, NOTHING.
What's suggested is that the filmmakers were either too lazy to finish their story (then why begin one in the first place?) or completely delusional in believing the remaining possible 10 minutes of the story could be stretched into ANOTHER 96-minute feature (as if they've gotten anyone to care after the FIRST 96 minutes).
If there's anyone reading this who is actually emotionally invested in a potential sequel, just to see an anonymous, flabby, mute teenager with no personality who isn't even introduced until well over an hour into 'Treehouse' get his comeuppance, please understand that your sons and daughters are making terrible movies.
Neutral, casual viewers out there just don't give a damn.
There's much more wrong with 'Treehouse' than just this, but when there's already a problem as bad as THIS "ending"... Why even bother going into more detail? Just stay away from 'Treehouse'. You'll find a better outcome watching grass grow or watching anything else.