Flour Child

Even taking the generally accepted subjectivity of humour and sentiment into account, I find it hard to fathom how such a sweet, funny, and well-cast comedy-drama as Dirty Girl (2010) could flop so hard, and attract so little positive buzz.

I suppose I am slightly biased by my pre-existing admiration for Juno Temple – who delivers another award-worthy performance as the eponymous potty-mouth, ‘Danielle’ – but this movie is really a two-hander, and I was also very impressed by Jeremy Dozier, making his screen debut as her shy, closeted classmate, ‘Clarke’. The two of them start to bond after Danielle is placed in a “special ed.” class, as punishment for talking dirty during a sexual health/abstinence lecture, and they’re paired up as the “parents” of a pretend baby, represented by a bag of flour. While researching the identity of Danielle’s long-lost father for the project, they discover his current address, and set off on a road trip to Fresno, to track him down and escape their respective domestic woes. Hilarity, broken hearts, (non-explicit) stripteases, and tearful encounters ensue.

I’m not going to pretend this movie is a perfect “10”… I think the plotting gets quite fuzzy towards the end, so the emotional highs and lows are never quite as high or low as they could be… but overall it’s such a fun, colourful, cheery ride, that I’m glad I ignored the reviews and picked up a copy on import (it still hasn’t been released in the UK, dammit!). I thought the scene where Danielle and Clarke dance in their car (to Teena Marie’s “Lovergirl”) was a particular stand-out, and may well count as my fave movie moment of the year so far… and I still keep chuckling every time I think about the changing expressions on the face of their seemingly sentient flour-bag baby (“Joan”). I know it’s a silly joke… but I can’t help myself!*

Of course, there are a couple of human co-stars who deserve a mention too: First up, it was great to see Milla Jovovich doing comedy again, playing Danielle’s reformed “dirty girl” mother… and pairing her with William H. Macy, as a devout Mormon step-father-to-be, made for a great dynamic. Then there was Mary Steenburgen as Clarke’s mousy mother, who learns how to roar and stand up to her homophobic child-beating husband, played by Dwight Yoakam. Top rate cast, all around!

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* When I spotted “Joan” in the above photo while cropping it, I actually started giggling again! There may be something wrong with me…

Furry Four-Legged Frenchies

An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) is a “sequel” to An American Werewolf in London (1981) in the same sense that your morning poop is a “sequel” to the food you ate the previous day. There may be some recognisable ingredients mixed in there, but most of the good stuff has already been removed during the digestion process, leaving only a soft, stinky, unappetising mush floating in the toilet bowl. So, you may ask, why not just flush it and forget it? Because, dear reader, hidden in that poop is a shiny diamond ring, glinting up at you, begging to be rescued, cleaned, and treasured!

[I know that’s not really the most flattering way to introduce Julie Delpy… but it’s the best analogy I could think of to describe her anomalous appearance in this flick!]

This low-brow tale of three yankee-doodle-douchebags travelling across Europe on a point-scoring “Daredevil Tour”, and goading each other into sexually harassing the locals, really has more in common with those god-awful straight-to-DVD American Pie spin-offs than it does with John Landis’ seminal horror-comedy classic. And if that were all the movie had to offer by way of characters and plot, I would have hit the “stop” button after the first ten minutes, and tossed it into the recycling pile… but then Delpy turned up as a suicidal Parisian werewolf with a tragic secret, and I couldn’t tear myself away, even as I cringed at the painfully unfunny antics occurring around her admirably straight-faced and heartfelt performance. These days, Delpy is a respected writer and director in her own right, so I’d love to see what would have happened if she’d been allowed to take charge of this production, and upgrade the other cast-members to the version of this story that she was acting out, while they were shamelessly flailing and gurning their way down the U-bend. Meh…

While Delpy emerges from this dreck with her dignity and reputation largely unblemished, simply by rising above the material like a radiant swan gliding over a sewage outlet, the same can’t be said for Julie Bowen, who is dragged deep into the muck as a ditsy American tourist, who quickly becomes wolf-meat before being brought back as an undead nuisance to the movie’s “hero”. Fans of her fine work as ‘Carol Vessey’ in Ed are advised to steer well clear of this stinker… it will only make you sad.

This Is How I.T. Ends

I liked the first three series of The IT Crowd enough to buy them on DVD, and have watched them several times since… but, for reasons I can’t really recall right now, I found the fourth series pretty disappointing, and still haven’t gotten around to revisiting it. Nevertheless, I was excited when I learned that the show would be returning for a special, one-hour reunion/farewell episode this week. Thankfully the show was just as funny as I remember it back in the day, and it was good to see “the gang” get back together for one last job. A lot of the jokes in Jen’s flirty-barista-based sub-plot were fairly visual in nature, so Katherine Parkinson didn’t get any opportunities to use her angry growly voice, or mispronounce the word “COMP-uter”, which is a shame… but there was a call-back to her naiveté concerning The Internet, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

On the down side, I was sent into a roiling nerd-rage by a joke about my beloved Game of Thrones. Basically, Roy was caught on camera-phone insulting a tiny barista, and gets labelled a “Small Person Racist” by the media… to which he responds: “Small people are NOT a race, this is not Game of Thrones!“. Now, anyone who’s actually watched the highly-rated, critically-acclaimed HBO show can tell you that Dwarves aren’t a separate race in GoT either… they’re a rare human anomaly, just like in our own world. I’m sure the joke still works for people who’ve never seen GoT, and are content to lump all Fantasy franchises together… but if they’d gone with Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons or Narnia, then the joke would have worked for everyone, dammit! [Sorry if this gripe seems a little “artistic”… but he who lives by the geeks, dies by the geeks].

Malèna’s Maligners

[Contains knicker-stealing SPOILERS!!!]

I assumed that misleading DVD covers were the preserve of obscure low-budget indie flicks, but apparently they’re now spreading to prestigious, foreign-language Oscar-bait too! The cover of Malèna (2000) is dominated by a photograph of Monica Bellucci as the eponymous eye-catcher, so you (and I) might be forgiven for thinking that she was the main character, when in reality she’s barely a character at all. If you took the time to read the back cover blurb (which I did not), you’d realise that this is in fact a coming-of-age tale about an adolescent Italian boy, living in 1940’s Sicily, who develops an all-consuming crush on a young war-widow (Malèna), and spends his days stalking her around town, spying on her private life, and then masturbating under the covers at night. Meh.

The problem here is that there’s absolutely nothing unusual or interesting about the boy’s own life or experiences… he could be pretty much any heterosexual boy, in any period of history. Malèna’s story, on the other hand, is a rare and (potentially) fascinating one, tied inextricably to the political and social turmoil of the period… so it’s incredibly frustrating that we are only ever allowed the briefest glimpses of her travails, traumas and trials, via an immature, unrelated observer. Perhaps this distance and detachment was intentional, as part of a larger comment on objectification and romanticisation, but the end result is that it’s damn near impossible to sympathise with her, or invest in her downfall, because we’re constantly kept at a distance.

The scene where the local women work out their long-simmering jealousy by beating her, tearing her clothes, and cutting off her hair, leaving her exposed, bloody, and whining like a dying animal, should be intensely disturbing and affecting… it’s the sort of thing that would reduce me to a sobbing mess in a more tonally consistent and emotionally engaging film… but here, all it inspires is an appreciation for Bellucci’s courage and commitment as an actress. Even worse is the scene where the boy watches Malèna being raped by her scumbag lawyer, and then scurries away without raising the slightest protest, or alarm. He’s perfectly happy to punish anyone who insults her behind her back (by peeing in their purse, or breaking their shop window), but when someone physically abuses her, he just lets it slide and goes back to his wanking… because apparently calling someone a “slut” out-of-earshot is a worse crime than raping them? WTF!? Then, via his narration, he “forgives” her for betraying his romantic ideal by stating that this was just her way of paying for the guy’s legal services! It’s hard to know if this was intended as a comment on the boy’s naiveté, or the ignorance and chauvinism of the time, but it kinda made me want to punch both him and the movie itself… which is implicitly suggesting that a boy’s feelings after witnessing a rape are more important than the victim’s feelings. Shudder.

There are basically three story threads running through this movie… the first concerns a young boy learning a hard lesson about first love, the second concerns a young woman being punished for her beauty and desirability, and the third concerns women in occupied countries consorting with the enemy. Sadly, writer-director Tornatore chose to focus on the laziest and least interesting of these threads, while paying insultingly short-shrift to the other two.

I also had an issue with the general tone of the piece… the first half plays like a bad cartoon, populated by the sort of grotesque stereotypes that only a native would be able to get away with (although why he’d want to perpetuate them at all is a mystery), and fuelled by a sort of overly-jovial misanthropy: “We’re all worthless pigs, driven by our basest instincts… LOL!!!” So when it tries to shift gears into melodrama, there’s no real foundation for the feelings it’s trying to draw out of the viewer… and the “one year later” coda just left me cold and mildly confused. Reading summaries of the story, I see that I’m supposed to read Malèna’s return to the town with her (not-dead-after-all) husband as an act of “courage”, but really it reads as inexplicable stupidity. Why even visit a place where you were raped, beaten, and abused, and where (as far as you know) everyone still totally despises you for no good reason, let alone move back there? It’s clearly a self-hating and potentially suicidal act, so why is it pitched as a feel-good triumph by Tornatore? It’s really no different from a character in a horror movie re-entering the cabin where she’s just been attacked by a chainsaw-wielding madman… except at least they’d have the excuse of acting crazy in the heat of the moment, whereas Malèna had a full twelve months away from this wicked little town to shake off her Stockholm Syndrome! GAH!!!

[Note: Apparently I watched the censored “American” cut, rather than the original Italian version, which included an additional fifteen minutes of footage (a detailed (and NSFW) account of the excised material can be found on the Movie Censorship website). So, I’m open to the suggestion that I haven’t seen the best possible version of this movie… but since my major issue is with the way the director venerates “The Male Gaze” over all else, I highly doubt that explicit nudity would have made me hate it any less… more likely, the opposite].

Cameoverload

Good lord, there was a lot of talent crammed into this week’s episode of New Girl (#3.2, “Jacooz”): Besides recurring co-love-interest ‘Elizabeth’ (Merritt Wever), Schmidt also had to contend with scheming co-worker ‘Beth’ (Eva Amurri)… while Winston suspected that his semi-exclusive girlfriend ‘Daisy’ (Brenda Song) was cheating on him… and Jess tried to impress  ‘Rose’ (Angela Kinsey) and ‘Molly’ (Dreama Walker), the cliquey-cool teachers at her new school! It was an embarrassment of riches… and by rights all of these actresses should probably be starring in their own shows right now… though I’d be happy to see them pop up here again in future episodes, obviously.

Of Veeps And Vaginas

Being a Brit, I wasn’t able to watch the Emmy Awards ceremony in full, so I’ve been trying to catch up on all my fave nominees via the internets.

Firstly, congrats to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who won Best Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, for her sterling work in Veep. According to Wikipedia, this is JLD’s fourth Emmy win to date… which also makes her the only woman to have won awards for three separate comedy series (Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine and Veep), while her initial nod made her the most nominated actress in Emmy Award history, with a total of fourteen noms (plus another two for producing the first two seasons of Veep). Yowsa! That lady’s a trophy-magnet! She also gave a very funny, in-jokey acceptance speech, shadowed by co-star (and fellow winner) Tony Hale, as her ever loyal purse-holder and prompter. Bless ‘em. Sadly, their fellow cast-mate Anna Chlumsky was denied the win for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series… although she did get an amusing cutaway gag during JLD’s speech, so that’s some consolation, right?

Either way, the award itself went to Merritt Wever, for her work on Nurse Jackie… which I’ve never seen, but she’s been so great in New Girl that I don’t doubt she deserves it. She also made a very short and sweet acceptance speech, which probably won her a few new fans to go along with her bling.

On the more Dramatic side of things, Claire Danes won her second consecutive Best Lead Actress Emmy for Homeland, which also won in the Best Writing category, and returns for a third season shortly… so, let’s hope they can keep the quality up, because frankly I’m not sure how I feel about the way they’re stringing out the whole Carrie/Brody romance right now.

Sad to say, American Horror Story: Asylum and Game of Thrones won precisely jack all this year… so let’s hope the Emmy judges are haunted by visions of Bloody-faced Serial Killers and Snow Zombies every time they try to sleep from now on, as punishment for this scandalous oversight.

As a special treat for the viewing audience, host Neil Patrick Harris launched into a half-time musical number, featuring cameos by Nathan Fillion and Sarah Silverman… which was cute an’ all, but I’d much rather see Big S winning another award for herself, dammit! Whatever happened to that pilot all the networks were fighting over a coupla years back? Was that all just a cruel prank? Double dammit!! Still, you have to admire the way she admitted to picking up her little-black-dress for $60 online, during the backstage interviews. Keepin’ it real, and makin’ thrift look foxy… yay for her!

“Step on it, Mr. Spodish!”

[Contains face-masks made of latex rubber, human skin, and SPOILERS!!!]

As I’ve learned the hard way, there are “terrible” movies that are terrible in an enjoyable and endearing way, but there are also “terrible” movies that are terrible in a tedious and/or insulting way… and this week I watched two critically reviled horror sequels that exemplified both sides of this tacky coin.*

On the “entertaining” side of terrible was Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994), which begins with one of the greatest opening shots in the history of cinema: an extreme close-up of Renée Zellweger’s mouth, as she carefully applies red lipstick. Hotcha! There are a lot of unscrupulous marketeers out there who will slap a large photo of a famous actor on the cover of their DVD, regardless of the role they play in the movie itself, or the length of their cameo… but Zellweger fans can rest assured that she is in fact the indisputable star of this schlock. As a stranded highschool geek being hunted by a “family” of backwoods psychopaths, she remains an admirably resilient, resourceful, and riled-up “final girl”, all the way to her (relatively) happy ending. I doubt Ms. Zellweger tends to brag about this movie too often, but she has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of here… she absolutely shines in every scene, providing ample evidence of the irrepressible charm, humour, and super-cuteness that have since made her a star. Matthew McConaughey, on the other hand, is probably better off pretending it never happened, because this is far from his finest hour. To be fair, I’m not sure anyone could really pull off this role any better than he did… a bat-crap-crazy killer with a remote-control cybernetic leg (!), employed by the Illuminati (!!) as part of an unspecified spiritual experiment on the local populace (!!!). Poor guy never had a hope of coming out of this movie with any dignity… but thankfully it doesn’t seem to have held him back none.

I also have to give a shout-out to Lisa Marie Newmyer and Tonie Perensky, who had some very amusing scenes as a weirdly-morbid “mean girl” classmate and deceptively boisterous femme fatale, respectively. They probably suffered more physical abuse than Zellweger did, but they also got bigger (intentional) laughs during their dialogue scenes, so I guess it balances out? I hope they felt it was worth all the discomfort anyway, because they helped to create an off-kilter horror-comedy that I’m proud to have in my permanent collection.

Which is a lot more than I can say for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). I imagine a lot of genre fans objected to the silliness of its central premise, even though that’s what compelled me to watch it in the first place: An elderly Irish toy manufacturer steals a five-ton rock from Stonehenge, so he can grind it up into computer chips, which are then sewn into novelty Halloween masks, and programmed to zap their wearers with a deadly magickal beam when exposed to subliminal messages in a special TV advertisement. Yeah, sure, why not? Never mind the fact that the differing time-zones across America will render the whole scheme half-assed at best… or that his factory is staffed with incredibly life-like clockwork replicants, masquerading as job-stealing immigrants, instead of more efficient machines… or that he chooses, in classic Bond-villain-style, to let the hero live to thwart his plan, for no apparent reason!

All that I can swallow with a smile… but a gorgeous young woman falling for a divorced deadbeat dad, who’s twice her age and kinda looks like Cliff Clavin from Cheers? Yeah, no… that’s where I draw the line. At first I found his skeevy attempts to put the moves on her amusing, assuming they were just unscripted symptoms of the actor’s own attraction to his leading lady (Stacey Nelkin)… but then the ill-conceived couple started kissing and sexing on the hotel bed, and I gave up any hope of ever seeing them as plausible, sympathetic characters. Even if the dude had looked like George Clooney, the fact that her real father had just been murdered would still have raised some very troubling questions about her state of mind when she succumbed to his blatant entrapment. “Hey, let’s go incognito as a married couple and share a room to avoid arousing suspicion!” Yeah… riiight. Still, the straws that really broke this turkey’s back were the flat dialogue and perfunctory performances, that sucked all the fun out of the silliness… plus an intensely irritating advertising jingle, that’s repeated about a millions times throughout the movie. Which reminds me… “Thirty-eight more days ‘till Halloween, Halloween, Halloween… Thirty-eight more days ‘till Halloween, Halloween, Halloween… Sil-ver Shamrock!!!” Gah!

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* Note: Obviously I’m judging them as movies in their own right, rather than measuring them against the seminal classics that spawned them, because, c’mon!]

Witchy Wunderkind

[Contains feather-tating SPOILERS!!!]

Although I’ve dipped in and out of a couple of Harry Potter flicks on TV over the years, I decided it was time to make a proper effort to appreciate this landmark series, starting at the beginning and working forward.

First, let’s get the negative stuff out of the way: My major issue with The Philosopher’s Stone (aka The Sorcerer’s Stone) (2001) is much the same issue I have with all child-oriented adventure flicks… namely, the narrative contortion and obfuscation required to sell the idea that an adolescent boy (or girl) could be the world’s only hope of salvation from terrible evil. He (or she) has to be the only one who understands the true threat, while all of the older, more experienced (and presumably more powerful) adult characters have to be too blind or sceptical to believe him (or her), even though we-the-audience know that something sinister is most certainly afoot. To be fair, that is mitigated a little here by the fact that Harry and his chums peg the wrong suspect for the crimes that are being committed around Hogwarts… but I think it’s rather odd that the staff seem so apathetic about investigating the allegations at all, considering his family history. And don’t they have any safeguards against attendees using magic to affect Quidditch matches? That would seem a pretty obvious precaution to take, to prevent the competing houses from cheating! I appreciate that Snape was trying to help Harry out, but you would think that the other teachers would be able to sniff out the sabotage… at the very least the supposed referee should have her “eye on the ball”, as it were.

I also have a problem with the disparity of scale between the cosy, Enid Blyton-esque boarding school shenanigans, and the larger battle with ‘Lord Voldermort’. I mean, Harry faces down the undead spirit of the wizard who killed his parents, along with a psychotic teacher who had apparently been hiding this parasitic evil under his turban the whole time he was working at the school… then the whole traumatic affair is laughed off as a jolly lark that earns his house some cup-winning points. Big whoop. I demand a public enquiry! Hagrid and Dumbledore must be called to account for their unforgivable negligence!

Now, on to the positive stuff: There’s no question that this film is fantastically entertaining… funny, exciting, suspenseful, and brilliantly cast. I also think that Harry is a very sympathetic hero, and it’s very easy to root for him as he stumbles rather humbly towards his destiny. I haven’t read the original novel on which this film was based, but by-and-large books tend to be better than their big-screen adaptations, so I can certainly understand how the series became such a phenomenal success. Tweenage-me would have eaten this stuff up with a spoon! I’m not a particularly nationalistic chap, but I also tip my hat to J. K. Rowling for insisting that the majority of the roles went to British (or British-ish) actors. Speaking of whom…

Although this was very much a kids’ show, there were a few familiar older faces in supporting roles: First up was Maggie Smith as ‘Minerva McGonagall’, the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts, as well as the head of Harry’s house. Then there was Fiona Shaw (of True Blood fame) as Harry’s emotionally abusive ‘Aunt Petunia’. Then a brief turn by Julie Walters as ‘Molly Weasley’, the chirpy mother of Harry’s new chum Ron. Then Zoë Wanamaker as the spiky-haired flying instructor ‘Madame Hooch’. And finally Geraldine Somerville (of co-starring-with-Robbie-Coltrane-in-Cracker fame) as Harry’s late mother, ‘Lily Potter’.

Meanwhile, the closest the film had to a female lead was Emma Watson, a then-unknown actress who has since gone on to world-wide fame and fortune, thanks to her work as Harry’s platonic gal-pal, ‘Hermione Granger’. As the school’s resident over-achieving know-it-all, Hermione could have come off as quite an obnoxious and irritating character, but thanks to the writing and Watson’s performance, she’s actually very endearing… and the scene where she keeps desperately raising her hand to answer the questions that Snape is aggressively firing at Harry, is totes adorable. Considering how obsessed Disney is with “inspiring” young girls to worship empty-headed pop-princesses, I’m glad to see that a geeky bookworm like Hermione can still become a beloved cultural icon… even if she is a bit of a weepy “damsel-in-distress” in this instalment. Fun fact: Although classified as a Brit, Watson was actually born in Paris (France), where she spent the first five years of her life! Sadly, she didn’t keep the accent…

Note: I bought the fancy two-disc edition, unaware of the convoluted puzzles I would have to slog through in order to access the disappointingly scant extras. Thankfully, some kind soul at The DVD Journal has posted cheats to help make the process a little less time-consuming. Hurrah!

Deep Borscht

My parents were big fans of the Police Academy films back in the day… they were the only movies they ever paid to
own on video, and were played pretty frequently in our house… but I hadn’t actually seen the seventh instalment, Mission to Moscow (1994), until yesterday, when it aired on Ch5. This is generally consider to be the worst of the series, and was the first to make less than a million dollars at the American box office (scraping a measly $126,247, against a budget of 10 million bucks!)… but I was still excited to see it, because of the setting and the cast.

Ron Perlman plays ‘Konstantine Konali’, a remarkably gullible and chatty Russian crimelord, who is planning to use a fiendishly addictive video game to hack into the world’s most private and protected computer systems (thanks to the efforts of a single, easily intimidated American geek… who seems to conjure the killer hack out of thin air in a matter of days!). On the other side of the blue line is Christopher Lee, playing ‘Alexandrei Nikolaivich Rakov’, a big cheese in the Moscow police force, who calls in ‘Commandant Lassard’ and his bumbling team of ageing Academy alumni (plus a random newbie), to help foil this dastardly plan. They’re aided by a young translator named ‘Katrina Sergeyevna’, played by Claire Forlani… who makes the most of her thankless, underwritten “local love interest” role, despite being paired with an equally underwritten wet-fish of a “hero”. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed by her attempt at a Russian accent, but she brings a lot of natural charm to the screen, and was clearly meant for greater things. She also looks mighty cute in her police uniform, so that’s a bonus.

The other major female cast member was series regular Leslie Easterbrook, returning as buxom badass ‘Captain Debbie Callahan’. She gets some fun scenes with Perlman when she goes undercover to seduce him… although she’s mostly just used as eye-candy here. I hadn’t really considered her career after the Academy before, but it turns out Easterbrook’s been in two Rob Zombie flicks (The Devil’s Rejects and his Halloween remake), and is currently filming/finishing a whole slew of new genre movies… so fair play to her.

Of course, the biggest star of the movie is Moscow herself… and you have to give the film-makers credit for making the most of their locations, and sticking to their guns (as it were) to finish the shoot, despite the political unrest that the city was enduring at the time (you can still see black scorch marks on some of the buildings, from recent tank shelling!). It’s just a shame that so much money, talent, grit and access was wasted on such a god-awful, unfunny folly.

Hurshe Kisses

I’m not a big fan of excessive gore or violence, so the real draw for me in watching horror flicks is the batshit surrealism that results when directors leave logic and decorum on the cutting room floor. Even the most serious story can descend (or ascend?) into unintentional comedy when walls start dripping with bloody memos, and old ladies start scuttling across ceilings! And that’s why I was so excited to discover The Heart, She Holler, a show that combines unsettling “Southern Gothic” strangeness with proper jokes performed by a cast of comedy pros.

[Note: The first “season” debuted back in 2011, with six episodes running just over ten minutes each… meaning I managed to watch the entire run over the course of two lunch breaks! That said, this is probably the sort of show you should ration out sparingly, to maintain its mind-boggling “WTF?” potency.]

Kristen Schaal plays ‘Hurshe Heartshe’, a psychotic, incestuous nymphomaniac who considers herself a shoo-in to inherit the family fortune (and absolute control of Heartshe Hollow) when her father ‘Hoss’ passes on… though she faces stiff competition from her psychokinetic, mind-reading sister ‘Hambrosia’ (Heather Lawless), who’s married to the town’s sheriff. Unbeknownst to the both of them, their devious Daddy secreted an infant son in the walls of his office, where he’s been growing ever since, completely cut-off from all human contact. Hoss’s plan was to have his own brain implanted into the imbecile’s head, post-mortem… but things don’t quite go his way, and he’s forced to fall back on Plan B, guiding his family’s destiny from beyond the grave via a series of strangely prescient (and interactive) video tapes, while they squabble and feud among themselves!

Obviously Schaal was supposed to be playing a grotesque caricature of a backwoods “vamp” here, but it was hard for me to ignore the bona fide hottie lurking beneath the garish make-up and ugly clothing… which is to say she still looked mighty cute dressed up as “trash”. Apparently, she’s been replaced by Amy Sedaris for the second season (which began airing on Wednesday)… but I haven’t seen those episodes yet, so I can’t really comment on how well she fills the role (or Schaal’s stripper-wear).