Geeks of Doom’s raucous reviewer with the rictus smile, Dr. Royce Clemens, continues his parsing of the first half of the 2007 movie season, bringing us fair warnings of what to avoid and why.

Remember that one SNL sketch where Justin Timberlake was playing Ashton Kutcher on an episode of PUNK’D? And then they punked one of the cast members done up like Fred Durst? He’s coming out the back door of a club and these two big dudes make like they’re gonna beat the crap out of him and Durst just breaks down crying and whimpering…

“Please don’t hurt me! I’ll… I’ll touch your wiener if you just let me go!”

And then Timberlake/Kutcher came out and said “WOW! You said you were gonna touch his WIENER! He didn’t even ASK you to do it, you just OFFERED!”

That’s what Eli Roth‘s work on Hostel Part II means to me. “Sure my movie looks misogynist, but THE LADIES ARE THE HEROES THIS TIME! And I know it looks senseless and stupid violent with no redeeming qualities, but I have ONE LINE in the movie that provides political subtext! ONE LINE! DEAR GOD, DID YOU NOT HEAR THE ONE LINE!? LOVE MEEEEEEEEEE!” He spends the entire movie presenting us with horrible, goofy shit and then backpedals to look smart, expecting us to give him a cookie.

Every neighborhood has a poseur punk like Eli Roth, where he threatens to kick your ass and the time you call him on it, he runs and hides behind his Uncle Quentin. All the swagger of a man without the balls to back it up.

Norbit is less a movie, and more a gaping psychological wound for anyone dumb enough to pay for it. Kurt Vonnegut had Dresden, so it is only fair that film critics have Norbit. Through this film, I have found that Hell is not hot and fiery, but humid and damp and smells like dirty secrets should smell.

And we have Eddie Murphy to thank, whose ego is so out of control and his glory days so far behind him that he feels the need to clone himself every few years to escape nay-saying voices. The voices that say “That’s not really funny. Actually, that’s retarded and kind of obscene.” Murphy has had the death of his career tolled so many times that he must surround himself with people who think he can do no wrong… namely himself.

I know I’ve said it before elsewhere, but: If Murphy opts to take up half the cast of another movie all on his lonesome, I hope to God it’s porno. So he can do what we all hope he does…

And he can go FUCK himself!

“Would you like a SMINT? I have to keep talking like an APPLEBEE’S waitress or else the BLOOD will stop flowing to my brain and I’ll die a SLOW, PAINFUL DEATH! Have you tried our Blazing Southwest Tomato Cilantro Wasabi Ranch JALAPENO POPPERS?”

“Okay. I’m serious. I’ll get on the train.”

“I AM the train!”

There is a five-minute stretch in Blood and Chocolate that could stand as comedy funnier that Borat in and of itself. It starts when Werewolf Rafe (Dick) is staring down Aidan (Dancy) in a Church, trying to get him to stay away from his equally Werewolfy cousin Vivien (Agnes Bruckner). The best he can muster by way of a veiled threat is: “You wouldn’t want to get buried in here… As a ceiling fan, or something…”

Then it hits. In the prelude to their big fight, Aidan sells out his girl and Rafe comes back with the single most absurd line ever delivered in a movie I’ve seen in the past five years. You guys do know this is a horror movie, right?

Truth be told, this one exchange is the one ray of sunlight in an entire movie that plays like Silver Bullet meets My Little Pony.

Dude… What the FUCK?

Is Grindhouse bad? No. But it is wildly varying. For the fifteen minutes prior to showtime, I was pacing around the theater lobby in excitement, something I haven’t done in quite a few years.

Three hours and twenty minutes later, I was left with a momentary thrill and a sore ass.

I think Death Proof is actually a classic, which truly GETS why Grindhouse movies kicked so much ass back in the sixties and seventies. They were swift, efficient entertainments made by folks who had a commitment to the job they were doing and BELIEVED in their hearts of hearts in what they were doing. The problem was, I had to wait through one middle of the road zombie movie and four hit-or-miss trailers to get there.

I was not the biggest fan of Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez‘ ode to the zombie flick… Actually, Planet Terror was less a love letter to John Carpenter and George Romero and more a love letter to shitty projection. Because that’s what he paid more attention to than his film. Granted, Tarantino had the “REEL MISSING” card and the pops and scratches too, but as the movie went on and the emotional investments started paying off he dropped it. Rodriguez made a condescending movie that got why Grindhouse movies were cheesy, but not why they were fun.

And what I had hoped would be three hours of laughs and thrills turned out to be a gimmicky vanity project with a few REALLY bright spots by two renowned directors who need a babysitter.

1. Someone gets speared.
2. Someone gets beheaded.
3. Someone falls off a cliff.
4. Someone gets shot with an arrow.

Just these four shots were played at various speeds throughout the entire middle of 300, so much so that I felt like I was being beaten about the head and shoulders with a tack hammer by LeBron James. Apparently I was the only one who noticed that JUST FOUR SHOTS doesn’t make a movie, because I had to sit through Internet yahoos typing out “THIS! IS! SPARTA!” for a month and a half because they were in shallow, geeky ecstasy.

“STOP THAT! It makes you look like a fucking nimrod!

How one-trick IS your movie when the South Park parody is better than the actual film?

“VIVA LA GARRISON!”

“I’m a director and huge comic book fan, given the biggest approved budget in Hollywood history for my second sequel to SPIDER-MAN. What will bring people into the theatre and send them out on a high note, in no way insulting people who stuck with me and the character for years?

“We do him up like Jared Leto and we MAKE HIM DANCE!”

Sure we can complain about the length of Spider-Man 3, the harassment by a love story we don’t care about anymore, and the mistreatment of Venom, but that one sequence hefted an entire franchise up in the air and threw it over the shark.

I’ve gone on at length about why I hate Hostel Part II, but I will say this…

That come December, when sin and virtue of an entire year are scored, I will NOT be calling Hostel Part II the worst film of 2007

I refuse to give it the satisfaction. It’ll just have to settle for acing the mid-term.

So in essence it boils down to how you would say “This is so bad, I’d wipe my ass with it.”

Yeah, well I WOULDN’T wipe my ass with Hostel Part II. It isn’t good enough for that privilege.

And no more shall be spoken of this film.