Smiley Face Movies
Cyndi Barca
Gory, graphic horror violence. Killer strikes victim repeatedly with a hammer, face shown bloodied and beaten. Dead bodies wash ashore after characters shown getting kidnapped by unseen assailants in a white van. Gas station clerk shot and killed. Character taken prisoner in a van, tied up as his blood is being drained before he's stabbed in the throat and killed. On a farm, a lamb is shown getting its throat slit as it screams. A farmer comes out of his home to find a pig carcass cut open, its entrails exposed. Hatchet deaths. Car chase, ending in car explosion. Lead character gets into a fistfight at a party.
College boyfriend and girlfriend shown trying to have sex. Later that night, they have audible sex in bed. Brief nudity, female breast. Lead character in the shower, male buttocks exposed. Lead character almost completely naked as he escapes from a van where assailants are trying to kill him.
Lead character and his fellow college student friends want to take "E" at a party; lead character forgets to bring it with him to the party, so his girlfriend goes back to his house to get it. Beer drinking in the backseat of a moving vehicle. Drinking at college parties. Talk of marijuana. Lead character wants to quit taking the meds he has been prescribed for his mental illness.
Parents need to know that Smiley Face Killers is a 2020 horror movie in which a college student is being stalked by serial murderers. Expect gruesome and gory horror violence. Characters are stabbed in the throat, struck repeatedly in the skull with a hammer, shot and killed, chopped with a hatchet. There's also a scene in which a lamb is sliced open with a knife as it bleeds and screams. A farmer finds a pig cut open with exposed entrails. Between the gory beginning and end of the movie, the lead character is shown struggling with mental illness, while also going to parties with his friends who want to take "E" and binge drink. Lead character and his girlfriend try to have sex in one scene, then have sex in another scene -- brief female nudity (breasts). Brief male nudity (buttocks), of lead character in the shower. Lead character escapes from a van and runs into a gas station minimart almost completely naked, with a small piece of cloth strategically covering the groin area. Some profanity, including "f--k." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.
In SMILEY FACE KILLERS, Jake (Ronen Rubinstein) is a college student who plays on the soccer team and enjoys riding his bike and hanging out with his girlfriend Keren (Mia Serafino). He's also struggling with mental illness, and has stopped going to therapy, and wants to quit taking his meds, even as his struggles are putting a strain on his relationships and friendships. One day, he begins receiving a series of creepy texts from an unknown sender. He tries to ignore the texts while he reluctantly agrees to go to a beach party with Keren and their friends, but he soon begins to suspect that the texts are being sent by Keren's ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, unknown to him, Jake is being followed by unknown stalkers in a white van. A mysterious hooded figure (Crispin Glover) lurks inside his house, waiting to strike. After going to a party to confront Keren's ex-girlfriend about the texts, Jake soon realizes who's really behind it, and after the assailants in the white van snatch him off his bike, he must find a way to escape the torture and death that has ended the lives of many college males before him.
While it has its fair share of suspense and utterly creepy moments, Smiley Face Killers gets bogged down by too much collegiate drama. After a succession of animal cruelty, mysterious kidnappings, and dead bodies washing ashore, the movie settles in to following the routine of the lead character, Jake, who likes to ride his bike around campus, play soccer, and hang out with his girlfriend. He's also struggling with mental illness, and it puts a strain on his ability to be a good boyfriend, loyal friend, and dedicated soccer player. The movie goes to great lengths to establish all of this, even with the ever-present threat of smartphone ringtone jump scares, and a disturbing saggy-mouthed Crispin Glover lurking in the darkness of Jake's apartment with a hammer. The college routines and drama go on a little too long, and while the movie makes an earnest attempt to convey Jake's struggles with mental illness, this story thread also goes on a little too long, especially since the movie is ostensibly supposed to be about serial murderers.
The movie was written by Bret Easton Ellis, and directed by Tim Hunter, who was involved in two classics of teens run amok -- Over the Edge and River's Edge. Perhaps one of the problems of trying to realistically convey 21st century youth is that it requires smartphones, and smartphones aren't really that interesting on-screen, as opposed to direct action. The third act delivers on what's hinted at in the film's first few minutes, even if the denouement comes across as cheesy as a true-crime Lifetime movie. This payoff of the third act is there and appropriately bizarre, but this payoff doesn't entirely justify the slow journey to get there. Of course, it's common to build suspense in horror movies, with jump scares and near-death building up to the proverbial bloody third act, but the middle here most often feels less like a build-up of suspense and more like hanging out with college students on a seemingly uneventful weekday afternoon.
Families can talk about how this movie was "inspired by true events." This movie is based on a theory, widely discredited, that the drowning deaths of dozens of male college students was due to serial killers rather than what is believed by the FBI, among others, to be due to drowning death after excessive alcohol consumption. Does the "inspired by true events" disclaimer at the beginning seem legitimate, or does it seem more like a way to heighten the scares to follow?
"The Ladies Man" is yet another desperately unfunny feature-length spin-off from "Saturday Night Live," a TV show that would not survive on local access if it were as bad as most of the movies it inspires. There have been good "SNL" movies, like "Wayne's World," "The Blues Brothers" and "Stuart Saves His Family." They all have one thing in common: "SNL" producer Lorne Michaels was not primarily responsible for them.
Michaels had nothing to do with "Stuart" and "Blues Brothers." Credit for the glories of the "Wayne's World" pictures, which he did produce, should arguably go to with their directors and stars. Mike Myers went on to "Austin Powers." Michaels went on to "Coneheads," "Superstar," "A Night at the Roxbury," and now "The Ladies Man." If I were a Hollywood executive, I would automatically turn down any Michaels "SNL" project on the reasonable grounds that apart from the Mike Myers movies, he has never made a good one. He doesn't even come close. His average star rating for the last four titles is 1.125. Just to put things in perspective, the last three Pauly Shore movies I reviewed scored 1.5.
"The Ladies Man," directed by Reginald ("House Party") Hudlin, stars Tim Meadows as Leon Phelps, a boundless enthusiastic seducer who seems stylistically and ideologically stuck in the sexist, early 1970s. The character, with his disco suits and giant afro, is funny on TV--but then so are most of the recurring "SNL" characters; that's why the show recycles them. At feature length, Leon loses his optimistic charm and slogs through a lame-brained formula story that doesn't understand him.
He plays a radio talk show host in Chicago (i.e., Toronto with CTA buses), who offers late-night advice to the sexually challenged. (To one lonely lady who can't seem to meet the right guy: "Take yo panties off and hang out at the bus station.") In real life he has extraordinary luck picking up girls, for reasons perhaps explained in one scene where he displays his equipment to a girl he's just met. We can't share the sight because he's standing on the other side of the bar, but from the way her face lights up while angelic music swells on the soundtrack, his pants obviously contain a spotlight and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Leon gets into trouble for what he says on the radio, is fired, and lands briefly at a Christian station, where he tries to sound devout but finds the struggle is too much for him. Following him loyally is his producer Julie (Karyn Parsons), who likes him because she can see he's a nice guy inside. Tiffani Thiessen co-stars as one of Leon's admirers, Billy Dee Williams is the bartender and narrator, and Julianne Moore has an inexplicable scene as the lustful Bloopie the Clown.
There is a painfully bad sequence involving bets in a bar about who is willing to eat what; it exists only to get a merde-eating scene into the movie. Meanwhile, a posse of outraged husbands forms on the Internet and wants to hunt Leon down for seducing their wives. They know they're all looking for the same guy because he has a smiley-face tattooed on his butt. At one point the outraged husbands have a song and dance scene. The movie makes the mistake of thinking it is funny because they sing and dance; next-level thinking would have suggested their song and dance be funny in itself.
All of the outraged husbands but one are white. Leon is black. The movie makes no point of this, for which we can be grateful, since lynch mobs are very hard to make amusing. Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" would have been funnier if this very movie, rather than a blackface minstrel show, had been offered as an example of black stereotypes marketed by white executives. While Lee's fictitious TV show could never conceivably be aired, "The Ladies Man" has been made and distributed and is in theaters as proof that Lee's pessimism is not exaggerated.
Smiley Face, a 2007 Stoner Flick, follows Jane (Anna Faris), a regular pothead and aspiring actress. Her normal day consists of 'waking and baking', eating chips and sleeping on her wonderful bed. The movie starts off with her talking to herself on the top of a still Ferris wheel. Then it goes back to 9 a.m. that same day, when Jane is smoking weed and playing on the computer. She goes to the fridge to get something to eat and finds her male roommate's batch of delicious cupcakes that he's saving for this Sci-Fi Party later. Of course, she eats all of them, but realizes they were also baked with pot.
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