The 44th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards was last night, and I really need to make it there one year. Not because I like songs about domestic violence and broken dreams, but because it’s probably the best award show if you’re looking for the greatest concentration of hot, skinny white chicks. I tried the American Latin Music Awards one time, and before I got in, some latin guy came up to me and stuck out his hand and said “Hola”. Then I just threw him my wallet and my keys at him and then hid behind a trash can. What does “Hola” mean?!! Is that some kind of gang slang?! Oh God, somebody help! Help!!!
Taylor Swift and Kellie Pickler:
Marisa Miller, Julianne Hough, Kaley Cuoco:
Carrie-Underwood-44th-ACMA
10 Awesome Horror Movies on Amazon Prime
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John Dies at the End (2012)
What do you get when you combine the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and "Supernatural?" You get John Dies at the End, an incredibly bizarre and energetic horror comedy about guys who take a mysterious drug called "Soy Sauce" and begin having visions of extra-dimensional demons. Directed by Bob Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep) and based on the book by David Wong, it's one of the most unusual horror films in recent years, but it's very funny and totally wild.
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Dumplings (2004)
Dumplings originally appeared as a short in the horror anthology Three Extremes, but the feature-length version is even better. Fruit Chan's film stars Bai Ling as a woman who sells special dumplings that make older women young again, but the ingredients are rare, and disgusting. But her latest customer doesn't care, and is willing to go to scary lengths to get more...
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Grave Encounters (2011)
On the surface there isn't much difference between Grave Encounters and any other found footage horror movie. It's about a team of documentary filmmakers investigating spook stories at a decrepit asylum, and guess what? The stories are true. But first-time directors The Vicious Brothers direct Grave Encounters with real ingenuity, leading to unexpected scares and exciting supernatural set pieces that make their film stand out from the competition.
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Monkey Shines (1988)
George A. Romero is best known for inventing the zombie genre, but there are a lot of underrated films on his resumé that have nothing to do with the living dead. Case in point: Monkey Shines, a strange but surprisingly effective chiller about a quadriplegic man whose helper monkey develops a taste for murder. It's an odd situation to milk for genuine suspense, but Romero does an impressive job.
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Ravenous (1999)
Originally overlooked by critics and audiences alike, Ravenous has since picked up a dedicated cult following. It's easy to see why. Antonia Bird's bizarre horror-western hybrid stars Guy Pearce as a coward stationed at an isolated fort, where the local legends about cannibalism turn out to be true. An unusual cast of characters, unexpected plot twists and some brutal action make it too weird to be a mainstream success, but too distinctive to ignore.
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Shakma (1990)
A nerdy gang of live-action role-players runs afoul of a homicidal baboon in Shakma, a film that isn't really "good" in any objective sense, but is absurdly fun anyway. That baboon is pissed off, and it looks like the film's dorky cast is in real danger the entire time.
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Shivers (1975)
Long before he was the critically-acclaimed director of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg made cheap high-concept nightmare movies like Shivers. A perverse new parasite creeps its way into a high-rise apartment, where the residents are infected and begin sexually brutalizing each other. It's a zombie movie with a sordid twist, and Cronenberg films it like a hygiene movie gone horribly awry. It's low-fi, but if you can get past that, it's also genuinely terrifying.
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The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Hugh Grant and future "Doctor Who" star Peter Capaldi star in The Lair of the White Worm, a sexy and borderline wacky tale of a snake cult hiding out in England. Amanda Donohoe plays the impossibly erotic ringleader, and director Ken Russell lends his usual orgiastic theatricality to a film that remains his most accessible, and by far his most fun.
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The Legend of Hell House (1973)
A group of parapsychologists move into a haunted house to prove, once and for all, that ghosts are real. Yes, you've seen it before, but this familiar horror trope has rarely been done better than in The Legend of Hell House. It's all creaking noises and frightening backstories and fear, and it's got a big bang of a climax that entertains as much as it scares.
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Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
One of the best horror comedies - period - stars Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as mild-mannered rednecks mistaken for homicidal maniacs by idiot teenagers. So the idiot teenagers try to kill Tucker and Dale, and keep accidentally killing themselves in front of two lovable yokels who have no idea what's going on or why. It's a fiendishly clever inversion of hackneyed horror clichés, and it deserves a much bigger audience.
9 Movie Characters Who Would Make Great Batman Villains
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Dominic Toretto
From: The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Gimmick: Muscle Cars
Dominic Toretto commits crimes to take care of his family. So Batman would probably have some respect for Toretto, but if he's going to keep committing high speed crimes the Dark Knight is still going to break out the Batmobile for the car chase to end all car chases.
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Louis Bloom
From: Nightcrawler (2014)
Gimmick: Crime Scene Manipulation
Lou Bloom doesn't care about breaking the law, he only cares about getting the best crime scene videos possible. This master manipulator would be a serious thorn in Batman's side, corrupting the evidence of major crimes and eventually trying to capture the vigilante himself on camera by setting the stage for the perfect photo op, with tons of collateral damage.
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Dominick Cobb
From: Inception (2010)
Gimmick: Memory Theft
Domick Cobb may be the hero of Christopher Nolan's Inception, but he's still a criminal, breaking into his target's dreams and extracting whatever information he needs from their subconscious. (What, like fear gas and freeze guns are plausible?) When Cobb breaks into Bruce Wayne's mind to extract valuable intel about his corporation, our hero would be in for the challenge of his life: protecting his secrets by purging his subconscious of everything batty.
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Joe
From: Nymphomaniac Volume II (2014)
Gimmick: Sex Therapy
In Lars Von Trier's sprawling Nymphomaniac saga, a sex-obsessed woman named Joe eventually turns to crime, using her intimate knowledge of human sexuality against her targets. She knows what men want, but what kind of sexual secrets does Batman hide? Would he be Joe's greatest challenge or her most unlikely victim?
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The Four Horsemen
From: Now You See Me (2013)
Gimmick: Stage Magic
The criminal stars of the heist thriller Now You See Me wouldn't be the most threatening villains Batman has ever encountered, but they could be some of the most challenging. The group consists of stage magicians who commit crimes so elaborate that no one can predict what they are really up to, and even the experts are often stymied by how they pull them off. Batman has a history with magic himself, learning the art of misdirection over the course of his travels, and would have quite a tough time keeping up with The Four Horsemen, who always think 20 steps ahead.
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Malkina
From: The Counselor (2013)
Gimmick: Cheetahs
The cheetah-spotted sociopath at the center of Ridley Scott's The Counselor is a master manipulator and, as the movie points out time and time again, she's also kinda like a cheetah. (She even keeps two of them as pets.) She is a vicious criminal whose willingness to cross any moral, ethical and even sexual line (she actually has sex with a car) would make it hard for even Batman to keep up with her machinations. We predict she'd be running Gotham's crime syndicates within a year, tops.
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The Collector
From: The Collector (2009)
Gimmick: Death Traps
The Collector started off as a knockoff of Jigsaw, but whereas Jigsaw is a passive villain who puts his victims in a death trap and gives them a chance to escape, The Collector has no mercy whatsoever. He actually wants his malevolent death machines to kill as many innocent people as possible, preventing anyone from rescuing the victims at the center of his homicidal labyrinths. Good luck, Batman. You're going to need it.
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Mary Mason
From: American Mary (2012)
Gimmick: Body modification
A former med student turned black market doctor, Mary Mason patches up criminals and performs illegal body modification surgeries on her willing clients. It's her unwilling subjects that make her a Batman villain, subjecting the sort of men who once victimized her to horrifying mutilations that they're forced to live with. Batman is used to getting captured and subjected to crazy death traps, but getting captured by Mary would be worse than anything The Joker could come up with. Maybe she'd take that whole "bat" thing literally. Wouldn't that be wild?
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Tyler Durden
From: Fight Club (1999)
Gimmick: Fascistic anarchy
David Fincher painted Tyler Durden as an irresistibly charismatic cult icon, assembling an army of the disenfranchised and aiming them at the complacent society that marginalized them. The results were explosive. Batman would have a hard time tracking Tyler Durden down - his identity is a well-kept secret - and wouldn't be able to trust his employees at Wayne Enterprises ever, ever again.
