Speaking as someone who has only recently cleared the threshold into thirty-somethingdom himself, I understand where The Long Slow Death Of A Twenty-Something, a copy of which the folks out at Maverick Entertainment sent out for review, comes from. And there’s a pretty good chance that most of you–including you not quite thirtysomethings–will get it too.

The first couple of minutes of The Long Slow Death Of A Twenty-Something actually manage to describe the plot pretty well, and so, I’ll quote them. “Ben Baker was a mediocre person at a mediocre job with mediocre friends who he wasn’t even sure he liked.” But the thing about Ben Baker is that he’s just about to turn thirty, and when that happens, a person generally tends to start looking back at their life up until then–a process which they really couldn’t do until then because they were largely too busy actually living it to even notice it had gone–and evaluating where they are against where they want to be. And more often than not, they’re not happy with the result. That will be the case with Ben Baker, and what he does following this realization is going to be…well…something to see.

A bit of background: this is actually directed and written by Larry Longstreth, whose work I’ve been watching since his animated shorts (Batman’s Gonna Get Shot In The Face is still easily one of the best DC pseudo-parodies I’ve seen in the last few years), so if you’ve been following along since the Bullcrank days, you’re going to be feeling this.

The newcomers, meanwhile, should be prepared for an adventure in the grandest Kevin Smith tradition, with all that that entails, including lengthy profanity-laced monologues at seemingly random intervals, and more than enough weed and ex-girlfriend jokes to choke an entire herd of horses.

Admittedly, I haven’t laughed like this since early Kevin Smith, which is, as we all know, better than later Kevin Smith in the same way that milk a day past its expiration date tastes vastly better than milk served chunk-style. The part where they show a LARP both as the characters see it and as how everyone else would see it is a sheer and unquestioned delight.

This is a conflict that most folks have likely had at some point, in which everything looks wrong. When acting like a grownup feels like an act, and doing what you always did feels less like a routine and more like a rut. The end result may not be as conclusive as one would like, but it’s authentic, realistic, and the exact kind of thing that we’ve all probably lived through.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this funny and thoroughly authentic portrayal of a man on the cusp of something a full ten out of ten. It’s entirely too good not to see, and should be required viewing for everyone between the ages of 25 and 35, or anyone who’s ever looked back on their life and asked the inevitable question: How the hell did I get here?.

It wasn’t so long ago we got a look at the first season of The PJs, and the folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of the second season of The PJs for us to hit, and this one is going to prove to be woefully diminished when compared against the first season.

The PJs Season Two takes us back out to the Hilton Jacobs housing projects, where the strangest cast of characters resides, attempting to make their way through life in the urban depression of…well…where ever exactly it is they’re operating out of. Amazon, for its part, still guesses Detroit, which makes perfect sense given what goes on in The PJs. And every episode will put them in a new and bizarre situation that often finds itself getting resolved in an equally bizarre fashion.

I give them credit for trying, and The PJs Season Two is going to have plenty of good laughs in it. But the problem is, they’re going to run into a host of problems. See, this is the beginning of the end for The PJs. This is the last season it was on ABC before its ill fated and ultimately series ending move to the WB (now called the CW). This is also the last season with Eddie Murphy as the voice of Thurgood Stubbs before it ended up getting tossed around by two different voice actors.

But The PJs will not go down without a fight. They’ll still have some outlandish situations here, like replacing an elderly woman with a crackhead in the same dress as the elderly woman in a bid to fool the people from the Department of Social Services so that said elderly woman can stay out of a rest home. Funny, yes, but just a little trite, especially given that we saw plenty of this kind of thing in the first season.  But they did still put a lot into it, and though the originality suffers substantially, it does still manage to succeed in the execution.

Interestingly, it’s less actively offensive than the first season was, but it’s also lost a lot of the original punch. All things considered, this is nowhere near as good as the first season, but still fairly decent.

And with that in mind, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives The PJs Season Two a five out of ten, a diminished, but still worthwhile, package that isn’t as good as it once was, but is still a reasonably decent presentation.

The folks out at Fox sent over a copy of Rio for us to review, and if you’re in the need for a dose of colorful, musical cheer, then you might have exactly what you need right here.

Rio follows a blue macaw named Blu, who truly awkward ornithologists believe is the last male of his kind. And further, there’s one last female of his kind down in Rio de Janiero. But Blu’s spent all his life as a cosseted pet in Minnesota, which leaves him lacking in a lot of the basics of wild bird behavior, like flying. But now, he’s about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, and hopefully, get the species back up and operational.

It’s actually not bad, though it’s clearly geared for the younger set, but the older folks should get a kick out of chronically typecast Jesse Eisenberg playing a cosseted pet bird. There’s plenty of action, some interesting subplots, and a few good laughs. Yes, again, this is definitely one for the kiddie set, but the grownups who’ll be watching along to monitor the kiddie set’s viewing should do all right here besides.

Admittedly, they’ll be riding the cliches pretty hard here, and the music is hit or miss for anyone over the age of seven, but there’s still plenty to like here.

Oh, and good news here for those of you who can’t get enough of the hyperactive acorn-addict known as Scrat: the Ice Age staple will be back in a short called “Continental Crack-up”, which provides perhaps the most preposterous explanation yet for how the continents showed up, along with the creation of giraffes and several major landmarks.

The end result here is that you’re probably going to be pretty satisfied with this, though not completely. It’s got its share of problems, no mistake there, but Rio will still do a reasonably good job of putting on a marginal romance with a little action geared safely toward the younger folks.

And the Screenhead Ten Scale, in response, hands over a seven out of ten to this worthwhile but flawed little romp that manages to pack in some reasonably good material, heavy on the colors and songs but light on the original plotline. You’ve seen better than this, no mistake, but it’ll put plenty of decent entertainment into ninety minutes, and is well worth a rental.

The folks out at Anchor Bay have been putting together a lot of interesting stuff of late; I personally remember when they were one of the best salvage operation in town, pulling up some great old stuff from the seventies and eighties. And now, they’ve clearly branched out into the new original stuff that’s actually pretty good. Today we’ve got an example of one such title, Meet Monica Velour, a copy of which Anchor Bay sent me for review.

Meet Monica Velour follows Tobe, a gawky, awkward teenage boy who looks like Napoleon Dynamite, but with a voice that sounds vaguely human. He’s fond of retro in most everything: music, movies…even porn. And as such, he’s enamored with eighties porn star, the titular Monica Velour. When he discovers that Monica will be putting in a special live appearance at a strip club, he packs up and heads for said club. But that kicks off a whole series of bizarre events that will bring Tobe a lot closer to his screen inamorata and let him discover more about her, and about him too.

This is a surprisingly clever drama with a lot of comic edge in on it, and that makes things surprisingly interesting. Admittedly, it’s a bit on the tired and schmaltzy side, the kinds of things you might see in dozens of other movies (if Monica Velour isn’t the zenith of the “hooker with a heart of gold” concept it’s hard to tell who would be, even if she isn’t a hooker at all), but at the same time, it’s not hard to see why something like this might seem familiar.

Remember how Hyenas was familiar and unwelcome? Well, this time, we’ve got familiar and welcome. Yeah, this is all those familiar things you’ve seen before, but this time, they’re surprisingly well put together. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, it’s both at the same time. And that puts this one ahead of a lot of others.

The performances all around are downright spectacular, and thoroughly make the movie. Frankly, this is what Napoleon Dynamite would have been if Napoleon had met an aging porn star instead of spending ninety minutes being an annoying halfwit.

It’s hard to believe a movie about an aging porn star can be both funny and sobering, but that’s just what Meet Monica Velour is, and that’s why it’s wonderful stuff.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Meet Monica Velour a very welcome eight out of ten–it may not be the most original movie you’ll see lately, but it’s very well put together. And that combination of joy and heartbreak together in one package makes for one great movie.

So the folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Hyenas for us to check out today, and it’s always worth keeping an eye on Lions Gate going after the direct to video horror market. Sometimes it turns out better than others, and this time, sadly, is one of the others.

Hyenas follows a family man named Gannon whose family was murdered one night. He’s not taking it well at all, which really isn’t much of a surprise, but while talking to the town’s hunter, he discovers that there’s a breed of horrors out there that rival even the horror of losing your family. And this particular breed may have had something to do with the loss of his family. So now, he and the hunter head out to put paid to the horrors themselves, before they can do any more damage.

It surprised me quite a bit to find Costas Mandylor in here, especially considering how busy the shooting season was for the Saw series (Costas Mandylor, in case you didn’t already know, was thoroughly fantastic as Detective Hoffman), but he does do a very effective job as Gannon.

The trouble here is one of plot, actually.  See, Hyenas is actually something of a misnomer. They’re actually WERE-hyenas, which is almost the same thing except it’s significantly more stupid.

Perhaps the worst part about Hyenas is that it’s not just stupid, it’s also boring. Deeply, deeply boring. You can see the end plot twist coming from a distance of several miles, and frankly, there’s really nothing going on in here that hasn’t already been done in any of a dozen other movies, and done better to boot.

The effects are low rent to say the least, and that really only adds insult to injury. But when we get a couple small sideplots about rival gangs of teenagers in a small town that doesn’t do much except give a couple characters who will be important later something to do, that’s about the crowning glory of this film’s sheer godawful.

That’s the down side of direct to video horror–it often doesn’t turn out anywhere near as well as we’d like, and that’s just what you’ll get with Hyenas, a whole lot of wasted opportunities couched in direct to video horror. It’s often, oddly enough, the case with direct to video horror in the werewolf vein, and though this isn’t werewolves–this is werehyenas–it’s still a pretty big disaster.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Hyenas a three out of ten; it’s a low-rent exercise in were-things gone kind of amok, and a presentation that doesn’t do anything neither new nor better than has already been done elsewhere.

Oh my, folks, do I have a treat for you today! The folks out at A&E sent out a copy of Storage Wars Season One to review, and I couldn’t be happier. This is one of my personal favorite shows, and having it all in one package is a sheer delight.

Storage Wars Season One is the lead-off season for Storage Wars, a show with a variety of entertaining features. Basically, in Storage Wars, we’ll be going to a series of storage locker auctions. See, if you rent a storage locker, and then fail to pay the rent for a certain length of time, the locker–and its contents–go up for auction to pay the delinquent rent. And here, we follow a group of four (actually five) folks who make a living on auction buying: Darrell Sheets, an inveterate gambler in search of the elusive “wow factor”; Barry Weiss, a seemingly wealthy and clearly eccentric (he once brought two psychics to an auction to give himself an edge) collector of unusual items; Jarrod Schulz and his wife and partner Brandi, who own a small resale shop; and Dave Hester, the abrasive, hard-charging owner of a big resale shop. These four factions will find themselves in constant competition, and then, once individual winners emerge, we get to find out just what they bought, and how much it’s worth.

See what I mean? Not only do you get the fun of the various factions intermingling–for instance, Dave is constantly at odds with Darrell, and that leaves them in frequent bidding wars, while Jarrod and Brandi are desperate to make their resale shop a thriving concern–but you also get the thrill of discovery on several levels. You get to find out what’s in the lockers, and then, what’s in the items in the lockers, in terms of value. Sometimes even literally, with those lockers that have trunks or cabinets or dressers or Jarrod’s personal favorite, lockboxes.

And this is why I’m convinced that this show is awesome. Yes, there’s an element of repetition here–you’re always at a storage auction, you always find stuff, it gets inevitably appraised–but there’s a lot of originality. Every item is different, every finder is different. There’s no way to know if Jarrod and Brandi will find something amazing one day, or if Dave will find something worthless (and he does occasionally–just ask him about his Frankenbike!), or what strange new “advantage” Barry will bring into play. There are so many unknowns in every episode that, essentially, we don’t know as much as the buyers themselves do, and that makes this very, very watchable.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Storage Wars Season One a full ten out of ten; you’re going to get a whole slew of great episodes here, some better than others, but most all of them impressive pieces of very watchable television.

So the folks out at Bloody Disgusting once again sent over one of their Bloody Disgusting Selects, and this time it’s a little chunk of horror joy called Coldfish, from the same guy who brought us Suicide Club. And remembering how bizarre Suicide Club was, It’s enough to make you wonder just how Coldfish will come off.

Coldfish follows the Shamoto family, who owns the Shamoto Tropical Fish Shop. They’ve seen better days–while the husband is a timid, mild-mannered sort, his wife is growingly dissatisfied with their marriage and their daughter is a disrespectful sneakthief. But when a fellow named Murata shows up after the Shamoto’s latest theft and offers to have the girl work in his shop, it kicks off a series of events that will lead to horror, murder and tropical fish.

Japanese horror, in my experience, is strictly a feast or famine experience. You don’t get too many mediocre Japanese horror films; they’re either wildly over the top with blood and hilarity, or chatty and spectacularly dull. Indeed, Coldfish will prove to be one of the latter, with loads of jokes intermingled with creepy scenes of a family slowly turning against a man in favor of a charismatic newcomer.

You’d never imagine that there was a seamy underbelly to the word of fish breeding, and yet, here it is. It’s actually kind of disturbing, especially when you watch some of the things they do here, and you have to remember–this isn’t Traffic; they’re not running drugs. This isn’t Lord of War; they’re not running guns. This is Coldfish, and they’re selling various species of tropical fish. They are running a PET STORE. This is like Sweeney Todd, only more thoroughly preposterous, if such a thing were possible. And it is, because here is the proof.

In fact, that’s really the best way to describe Coldfish. It’s thoroughly preposterous. Most everything that goes on here is just bizarre. And frankly, that’s appropriate, considering this is the same guy who gave us a movie where about twenty schoolgirls simultaneously joined hands and jumped in front of an oncoming train in the first five minutes.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this ultimate expression of sheer bizarre an eight out of ten–if you like your movies weird and bloody, then you’re in for a treat on par with anything you’ve ever seen before. Japanese horror has a new and thoroughly preposterous entry into its annals.

We’ve seen a lot of great horror come out of the IFC, so it’s always a bit exciting when another one crosses my doorstep. And the folks out at the IFC were only too willing to oblige when they sent out an advance copy of Spiderhole for me to review.

Spiderhole takes us out London way, where a group of dirt-poor art students believe they’ve found the house of their dreams. It’s big, it’s empty…it’s abandoned. The art students believe they’ve found the squatter’s rights paradise they’ve been longing for, and for a while, it seems like they’re right. But the house they’ve picked was locked up for a reason: not just to keep squatters out…but to keep something entirely different, and much more dangerous, in.

Admittedly, I’m not up on my United Kingdom criminal code, so whether or not this is even feasible is an utter loss to me. But it is reasonably believable, and as such, does a nice job of putting out a pretty scary piece of work.

It doesn’t take long for the convivial party atmosphere to devolve into a scene of terror and suspense, and it’s that sudden, jolting switch that makes things extra unnerving.

Sadly, it can’t keep this up for long, and it quickly devolves into a shot of torture porn that’s basically reduced to stalking, kidnapping, and amateur medical dismemberment.  It does manage to improve for a while, doing some very interesting counter-siege kind of work, but sadly, this doesn’t manage to stay the case for very long.

And frankly, there’s a lot worse wrong than that about Spiderhole. I can scarcely believe that this is an IFC title, frankly; the narrative is a mess–to this second I’m not a hundred percent sure why all these killings went on in the first place. I’m also not sure what the deal was with the main villain, either. None of his motives make sense given what we know while we’re watching. I never spent so much of a horror movie so thoroughly lost in a plot as I did with Spiderhole.

Spiderhole is an unmitigated disaster, but since there are some good and creepy parts to it, it does manage to save itself from being a complete loss, but this is still probably the worst film I’ve seen from the IFC. I’m thoroughly dismayed.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives a contemptuous three out of ten for the new low-water mark from the ordinarily terrific IFC. I expect the best from them, and it’s always disappointing when they let you down.

We all need food. There’s just no other way to put it–we all need food. And while we don’t need much more than bread and water, we’ve learned it’s better to not just get by, but get by in grand style. And plenty of restaurants all over the world have sprung up to supply us. Some restaurants, though, are better than others. And that’s what we’re going to look at with Best Food Ever, a copy of which the folks at TLC sent over for review.

Best Food Ever takes us around the United States, looking at a variety of food, from food carts to sandwiches and diners and beyond with a host of dishes. Narrated by no less a figure than John Goodman, who you can believe really likes his food just by looking at him, you’ll see food you never even imagined existing from all corners of the globe.

For instance, you’ll be introduced to a hamburger in Atlanta, Georgia at a place called the Pullman and Finch Public House. The hamburger there, a two-patty masterpiece with onion, cheese and pickles that’s made from a combination of sixty percent chuck to forty percent brisket, that’s ground on premises. It took fully twelve different recipes to determine the exact mix. And then, even the condiments are made on site. If you want one, you have to go to the Pullman and Finch at ten PM,  every day. And that’s just number ten on the sandwich list.

This is food porn on par with most anything you’re going to find anywhere. Elaborate preparations, rare ingredients, massive servings and even a little dose of the preposterous, you’ll be hearing about everything you can imagine, and plenty of things you can’t.

Naturally, this is something of a niche product. You’re not going to get much action here, or even a whole lot in the way of entertainment. But if you love hearing about restaurants, and finding new places to eat–not to mention new things to eat–the end result is that you’re going to love this. But you’re not going to be able to get around it if you don’t like hearing about food for three and a half hours, which is how long this runs.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives TLC’s Best Food Ever a seven out of ten–it has a great niche, and some of the food is just so preposterous that it’s hard not to be amazed by it all. Still though, you’ll have to be fond of food to get anywhere with this, and if you’re not that big a foodie, then you’ll never get anywhere with it.

I can’t tell you how excited I was to see that Mars Needs Moms was coming out. Created by one of the greatest newspaper cartoonists of all time, Berkeley Breathed (of Bloom County, Outland and Opus), it was great to see something like this come along. But would the movie live up to the greatness Bloom County wrought? The folks out at Disney sent a copy over, and the end result was a serious surprise.

Mars Needs Moms follows Milo, a little boy who’s not exactly happy with his mother these days. A little too much of that eat your broccoli / take out the trash sort of thing has left him a bit soured on it all. But when a horde of Martians abducts his mother to serve in their employ (ironically enough, the Martians actually select his mother because she told him to take out the trash, and he did it), he realizes that he needs her back, and badly. How badly? Badly enough to stage a one-boy invasion of the Red Planet. But he’ll get some help from surprising sources, and he just may have enough skill, courage, and help to make it through Mars and liberate his mom.

Admittedly, the first ten minutes or so are a little too Home Alone for comfort, but after that somewhat shaky start, the full Breathed charm is going to kick in, especially when we meet Reagan-era space traveller Gribble. For those not familiar with Bloom County, that was when Breathed was best. The man knows his eighties, and having Gribble involved is almost like having Portnoy as an astronaut. It’s terrific.

It’s a little on the cliche side, and I’m figuring that’s a bit of that Disney impact shining through, but at the same time, there’s plenty of quality action footage and a lot of sci-fi joy that’s very much Breathed. In fact, by the tail end of this, there’s going to be a good dose of doubt as to whether or not the main character will even survive. It will actually manage to be shades of Total Recall, just nowhere near so graphic.

Mars Needs Moms is actually something of a surprise, with bits of the cliche mixed in with some pretty exciting stuff. If you can forgive the one, then you’ll really get a bang out of the other. And thankfully, the cliche is in relatively small doses against the much more exciting science fiction action sequences, and that makes the whole much more palatable.

The Screenhead Ten Scale lands Mars Needs Moms a seven out of ten; there’s a little more here cliche and overdone than I’d like, but there’s also plenty of good stuff here that will make it well worth watching.