Tag Archives: Jeff Shuster

The Curator of Schlock #326: Underwater

10 Friday Jul 2020

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The Curator of Schlock #326 by Jeff Shuster

Underwater

It’s like The Little Mermaid only totally different. 

I like to think I’m not a difficult house guest, but Grantchester is back on Masterpiece Mystery and I will not miss a single episode for anything! Unfortunately, we had quite a storm this past Sunday and I had to send my manservant Jervis out into the thick of it. I asked him to keep the satellite dish steady so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting those nasty digitized bits while I find out if the dashing Will Davenport can repair his strained relationship with his mother. Jervis got a bit drenched and seemed to be working through a fever while cooking my eggs the next morning. He made them over easy instead of sunny side up, but I didn’t say anything because I’m a good guest.

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Tonight’s movie is 2020’s Underwater from director William Eubank. We get flashes of news headlines in the beginning stating something about a drilling station deep at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Kristen Stewart plays Norah Price, a plucky and nihilistic engineer/computer wiz. You remember Kristen Stewart. She played Bella Swan in those Twilight movies. I’m a bit of a Twihard myself. Team Jacob for the win! Am I right? So Norah is busy brushing her teeth when the underwater bunker begins to shake and the computer is rambling about structural integrity or something to that effect. She runs into another employee of the drilling company, a young man named Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie) before the two of them decide to seal their part of the station off before their section gets flooded..They watch in horror as other crew members run for their lives only to get obliterated because they couldn’t reach safety in time.

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The two of them run into other survivors as they climb through the rubble of the station. These include Paul (T.J, Miller), a funny crew member that won’t be the first to die, Lucien (Vincent Cassel), the French captain of the station, Liam (John Gallagher Jr.), a manly engineer, and Emily (Jessica Henwick), the station’s biologist that loves corgis.

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They need to get out of the collapsing part of the station and don’t ask me to repeat all of the scientific doublespeak spewing from their mouths. The gist is they have to put on these heavy and dangerous high-tech scuba suits that allow them to walk on the surface of the ocean.

UNDERWATER

A crack forms in Rodrigo’s helmet once underwater and he can’t handle the pressure. I’m not talking about psychological pressure, but the physical pressure of having no protection from the water at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The rest of the crew move on and gradually learn the cause of the station collapsing. There be monsters swimming around under the sea, squid-like creatures that most likely came through the surface when the drilling crew drilled vin the wrong spot. It’s basically Alien underwater, but it’s better than Deep Star Six. There are worse ways to spend 95 minutes.

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Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #195: Life

08 Friday Sep 2017

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The Curator of Schlock #195 by Jeff Shuster

Life

More like death, lots and lots of death.

Welcome to week two of the Museum of Schlock’s Relativity Series, a range of exhibits that dare to ask what’s really out there. Each year Hollywood gives us some inspirational movie about NASA. Whether it’s Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian or The Arrival, these movies teach us about the triumph of the human spirit in the perils of space. 2017 has given us Life from director Daniel Espinosa, a film about a group of scientists discovering the first definitive proof of life outside of planet Earth.

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The title of this movie gives me hope. What’s more hopeful than life itself?

So these scientists are stationed on the International Space Station. You have two Brits, two Americans, one Japanese, and one Russian. I guess that’s international enough. Ugh. I hate movies with too many characters!

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We’ve got six scientists here. Let’s see. Rebecca Ferguson plays Dr. Miranda North, an officer with the CDC.

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Ryan Reynolds plays Rory Adams, an engineer of some kind. Hiroyuki Sanada plays Sho Murakami, another engineer. Olga Dihovichnaya plays Ekaterina Golovkina, the Mission Commander. There. I think that’s it. Crap. I’ve got two more characters. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dr. David Johnson, a medical doctor who used to serve in the American military. Finally, you have Ariyon Bakare playing Dr. Hugh Derry, a genius exobiologist who is paralyzed from the waist down, but enjoys free movement in zero gravity.

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The space station recovers a probe NASA sent out to Mars. It contains dirt. Martian dirt! Dr. Derry is especially excited when he discovers a dormant cell in one of the samples. Dr. Derry manages to wake up the cell after some poking and prodding. A media circus ensues. A little schoolgirl wins a contest where she gets to name the organism. She names it Calvin after her elementary school, no doubt named for Calvin Coolidge, our 30th President. Calvin keeps growing in size and forms tentacles. For some reason, this doesn’t alarm anyone. A lab fire causes Calvin to go dormant again much the dismay of Dr. Derry.

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He starts poking at it with a dental scraper. Suddenly, Calvin springs to life wrapping its tentacles around Dr. Derry’s rubber gloved hand. It starts crushing Dr. Derry’s hand until every bone is broken. Only then can Dr. Derry slide it through. He passes out shortly after. Calvin then uses the scraper to puncture the glove, slipping out into the lab to devour a captive gerbil. Okay. Screw Mars!

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Things go from bad to worse. Rory rushes in to rescue Dr. Derry. He pushes Dr. Derry out, but Calvin latches onto his leg. Rory uses some kind of blowtorch on the creature, but it evades and evades until he runs out of fuel. Sealed inside with nowhere to flee, Rory is defenseless as Calvin slips down his throat and begins to devour his insides. Rory slowly coughs up globules of blood before expiring. Calvin escapes through the sprinkler system. This crew is screwed. Yes, I know I used screw twice in this review. It’s that kind of movie.

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NASA, just leave Mars alone. Please!

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Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #117: Pixels

01 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in Film, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #117 by Jeff Shuster

Pixels

It’s everything you expected it to be.

Happy New Year everybody! It’s your Curator of Schlock here wishing you the best in 2016. Hopefully, it won’t be one more year of the same old crap. We’ve got that Batman Kills Superman movie to look forward to.

Sigh.

To be fair, 2015 was the year I fell in love with going to the theaters gain. I saw some good movies like the one with the dinosaurs and one where the French guy tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers. But there was one movie I avoided seeing until now: Pixels.

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We all saw the trailer. They played it before every major motion picture that made it to theaters last year. You must have seen it, the one where Professor Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, gets his hand bitten off by a giant Pac-Man. I guess it was funny in the trailer, but everyone knew the movie was going to be a turkey as soon as Adam Sandler’s name was attached. Attacking Adam Sandler at this point would be redundant, but I don’t think he’s the worst thing about this movie. Pixels is a sloppy attempt at pulling on the heart strings of children of the 80s like myself.

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For many 80s kids coming home after school to play the Nintendo or Sega was the only bright spot in our miserable childhoods. That and a new episode of Mr. Belvedere on Friday nights.

As an adult, I still know about all of these damn games from the 80s so showing that stupid cylinder thing from Arkanoid destroying the Taj Mahal doesn’t impress me. I know what Arkanoid is and I know it came out in 1986. The whole premise of the movie is that NASA sent footage of a video game tournament out into space and a bunch of aliens got hold of it and treated it as a declaration of war and created weapons in the shape of video game characters to come and kill us. But the footage was stuck on a satellite in 1982, four years before Arkanoid came out in the arcades. The movie is bullshit.

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Sean Bean is in this! You played Richard Sharpe, dude! Peter Dinklage? I loved you in The Station Agent! Michelle Monaghan, you were on the fantastic True Detective Season 1! Not to be confused with True Detective Season 2 where I found myself 8 episodes in and was still not sure as to what mystery the detectives were trying to solve. I think there was a murder…

Brian Cox is in this Pixels! Actually, Brian Cox is no stranger to video games. He played Lionel Starkweather, a director of snuff films and the main antagonist of the video game, Manhunt. You played a death row criminal who this sadistic rich guy let’s out of prison so he can watch you slaughter a bunch of serial killers and pedophiles roaming the city streets. The whole scenario is done for his amusement as he whispers things in your earpiece like, “You’re really turning me on.”  If you had Playstation headphones, he would say these things right in your ear. Not that I ever played this game.

Anyway, the real reason I’m down on Pixels is because the aliens in the movie talk to us by pretending to be deceased 80s personalities like Ronald Reagan, Tammy Faye Bakker, and Madonna. Stupid, but not a big deal. And then they make themselves look like Max Headroom.

Ahem. Max Headroom isn’t dead! He’s an artificial intelligence. He can’t die! In fact, why aren’t they giving Max Headroom his own movie instead of this crap? Why aren’t we getting TRON 3 instead of this crap? Pixels is nothing, but mindless 80s nostalgia and I’m through with it. Popular culture did not begin in the 1980s. And as you’re Curator of Schlock, I will now make my New Year’s resolution. I will not present a single movie from 1980 upward for an entire year!

Five Things I Learned from Pixels

  1. Adam Sandler just doesn’t care anymore.
  2. Kevin James should never be elected President of the United States.
  3. Josh Gad looks like he should be in a movie about Steve Jobs. Oh wait. He was.
  4. Q-Bert isn’t cute. Q-Bert will never cute.
  5. Don’t make major motion pictures based off viral videos!

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Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #68: A Bionic Christmas Carol

12 Friday Dec 2014

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The Curator of Schlock #68 by Jeffrey Shuster

A Bionic Christmas Carol

Steve Austin vs Ray Walston

Bionic1I’ve got a problem with mustaches. I admit it. I don’t like it when they curl up into the nostril, fusing with the nose hair like Jauquin Phoenix’s in Her, but I also don’t like the kind that Lee Majors had on The Six Million Dollar Man.

bionic3It’s too thin and it hangs too low on his upper lip. These men need to take their cues from Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds.

BurtMustaches aside, it is this Curator of Schlock’s expert opinion that the tenth episode of the fourth season of The Six Million Dollar Man entitled A Bionic Christmas Carol stands as one of the greatest adaptations of the classic Dickens’ tale.

Bionic2Now I know some of you movie snobs out there are decrying the very idea of including an episode of a TV series on this blog, but every episode of The Six Million Dollar Man was like watching a major motion picture! The guy fought Sasquatch! Sadly, you’ll get no such fights in A Bionic Christmas Carol. Our episode begins with Colonel Steve Austin (Lee Majors) meeting up with Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson) for their annual day before Christmas lunch. Wow! I mean day before Christmas lunch sounds delightful! I wonder why Steve Austin didn’t just call it Christmas Eve lunch, but who am I to question the Six Million Dollar Man?

Anyway, their lunch is cancelled because some curmudgeonly old miser named Horton Budge (Ray Walston), president of the Budge Corporation, is keeping the plant open on Christmas Eve. Boooooooh! Now, some of you may know Ray Walston from TVs My Favorite Martian or Picket Fences, but I’ll always remember him as Mr. Hand from the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  I can’t believe he ate Spicoli’s pizza in front of the entire class. What a jerk! All the kids are on dope? Go to bed, old man!

bionic4Anyway, Mr. Budge hates Christmas, and hates his nephew, Bob Crandall. It seems that Bob embezzled some money from Budge, but it was to save his Mrs. Crandall’s life and pay for her expensive medical treatments. Instead of reporting his nephew to the police, Mr. Budge made Bob into his personal chauffeur, having Bob run errands whenever he wished. This means no Christmas dinner with the family for Bob and no Christmas bonus to spend on gifts for his kids. Sadly, there is no scene of Steve Austin reaching into Mr. Budge’s stomach and pulling out his spine with his bionic arm. You could only get away with so much on network TV in the 1970s.

Steve Austin was sent to Mr. Budge to inspect the equipment Mr. budge was developing for a future NASA Mars mission. (Hahahahahahahaha!) The test astronaut almost catches fire due to the fact that Mr. Budge only pays for the bare minimum of safety requirements. You’d think that the bare minimum would be enough. What else happens in the episode? Steve Austin bionically leaps up and tears off the top off of a Sequoia so the Crandall kids can have a Christmas tree. He also dresses up as Santa Claus in order to spook Mr. Budge into accepting the spirit of Christmas. What more do you want from 70s TV?

Five Things I Learned from A Bionic Christmas Carol

  1.  Leisure suits are still better than Parisian Night Suits.
  2. The Bionic Man loves Christmas, unlike Batman who hates Christmas!
  3. Ray Walston was born at 60-years-old.
  4. Sunny California doesn’t exactly scream Christmas.
  5. Kids were hard to love in the 70s.

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Photo by Leslie Salas.

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, and episode 124) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.