LOUIS FOWLER'S “DEVASTATOR TOUR '09”!

You wanted the best, well...they didn't make it, but they send their regards and instead, ask you to accept Louis Fowler in their place. No?

The tour was originally scheduled to start yesterday, but a sudden blizzard screwed those plans royally, so it had to be pushed back two days. For those that are interested, here's my tour itinerary for the next couple of weeks:

SAT., MARCH 28: ONE NIGHT ONLY! Louis will be at HORRORHOUND WEEKEND, at the Marriott Indianapolis East in Indianapolis! Come by and use the secret phrase “The cow is of the bovine ilk, one end is moo, the other milk!” and I'll pour you a tumbler of Midori Sour! Also scheduled to appear: the C-PAP SUPERSTARS!

MON., MARCH 30: Special breakfast show! Meet me at the PITTSBURGH GREYHOUND STATION at 3:40 in the morning! I'll be there for two or three hours! Let's have a bus station breakfast together! Please don't stab me!

TUES., MARCH 31: Hey there, Baltimorons! Louis will be in your neck-of-the-woods, partying B-town style with the ATOMIC TV crew! Come meet Louis and all your favorite public access superstars! Who knows what TV magic we'll make?

THURS., APRIL 2: Are you hungry? I am. A lot. Much of the time I'm afraid I have Prader-Willi Syndrome. What better way to feed this need than with a Baltimore food tour with the Hungover Gourmet himself, Dan Taylor! Crabcakes and cheese-steaks, here I come!

FRIDAY, APRIL 3-5: SPECIAL THREE-DAY ENGAGEMENT! Louis will be partying hard-core (and by hard-core, I mean in quiet moderation! Yeah!) with Dan, David Z. and God knows who else at CINEMA WASTELAND in Cleveland, Ohio! You can be the God knows who else! Don't be scared, just walk right up and hug me! It's cool!

GONNA MISS THIS FIRST LEG OF THE TOUR? OKLAHOMA TOUR COMING SOON! KEEP CHECKING FOR UPDATES! LOUIS FOWLER'S DEVASTATOR TOUR—A LiveNation event, brought to you by Midori Brand Liquors! All the queer, and none of the rear!

(Seriously, regular DAMAGED posting will resume next week. Don't you forget about me. No, no, no, no, don't you.)

NEW YORK CITY SERENADE: Ed Burns called, he wants his failed career back.

NEW YORK CITY SERENADE
Starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Chris Klein, Jamie-Lynn Sigler
Directed by Frank Whaley
Anchor Bay Home Entertainment
Review by Louis Fowler

A lot of people—especially lazy critics—when they talk about the worst films ever made, always seem to attack genre films first. I think that's unfair. It's a way too easy target: most horror and sci-fi films are so dependent on special effects and preposterous-enough plots, that it's incredibly easy to screw those types of movies up and, you know, nine times out of ten, the filmmakers probably will. It's really no mean feat to make a “bad” genre picture.

Now serious, thought-provoking, insightful dramas—those are the films that people should scrutinize. Those are the films that shouldn't get the easy pass. Think about it: all dramatic filmmakers have to do is write a convincing problem, some convincing dialog and half-way decent actors who can emote. Set up the camera, press record and the movies done. Yep, when you fail at drama, you fail big time. You fail royally. You fail as a filmmaker and, even better, you fail at life because you can't even convincingly put it on the screen.

Frank Whaley just may be the biggest failure of them all, because his latest “effort”, NEW YORK CITY SERENADE should go on record as—sorry TROLL 2—the real worst movie ever made. SERENADE is that type of overwrought, thirty-something “guys who can't grow up” type of Ed Burns-wannabe indie flick that sucked in, say, 1995 and, to make one now is, well, just plain embarrassing. (For Frank, not us. No, for us, it's a laff-a-minute guffaw-fest.)

As if to add insult to injury, Whaley, a 90s has-been himself, casts, as the movie's leading men, 90s teen-dream has-beens Freddie Prinze Jr. and Chris Klein as a pair of New York cads you love to hate. Watching them on-screen is like watching the Budd Dwyer suicide tape on a constant loop, but with a view of the New York skyline in the background. This is the type of movie designed to make you hate actors and, well, the entire art of acting. Hell, it made me hate the entire art of filmmaking too.

The wonderfully bland Prinze is a supposed filmmaker—I think he's supposed to make independent art-flicks, LOL—who cheats on his “Joisey”-trash girlfriend (the quickly fading into obscurity Jamie-Lynn Sigler) at a party. She finds out, breaks up with him and he's depressed. Like, REALLY depressed, bro. He almost doesn't finish his Heineken.

On the other hand, the halfway-to-autistic Chris Klein desperately tries to shake his “aw shucks” persona by playing an absolute dick of a drummer who has a womanizing “problem”, a neglected daughter problem and, best of all, a wispy little mustache problem that, no matter hard he tries, just won't grow in all the way. (You almost wonder if Chris's acting teacher told him that “mustache = drama”. His 'stash has more on-screen presence than Klein ever could.)

Together, they go to a film festival where Klein impersonates lilliputian Wallace Shawn's son, gets them kicked out of a hotel, complains about the price of refreshments at a film screening and comes to terms with their moronic arrested development. It should be a real moving, dramatic, tension-filled moment, but coming out of this duo's monosyllabic drool-crusted lips...well, you almost expect Bela Lugosi to show up and scream “PULL THE STRINGS!”

For example:

Freddie: “Yo, I love my girl, dogg, and yo, you gots ta take care of yur liddle girl! Doan't be a alcoholic like your father, bro!”

Chris: “Awww...fuggedboutit, homey! You juzz don't get me! Let's go check out a Yankees game! Ayyyyyye!!!”

The whole film seems to bank on the fact that the public has been dying to hear Prinze and Klein recite melodramatic, junior high drama class dialog in utterly cheesy, almost slapsticky, New York accents for 103 minutes. I know I have been.

And that's the best part: watching the utter sincerity in Freddie and Chris's performance. You can really tell that they BELIEVE in these roles and deliver them with every bit of acting know-how they can muster, which, sadly, is very little as they were never very good to begin with. You feel as if maybe, just maybe, they think this film would be their big dramatic comeback, finally, after all the SHE'S ALL THATs and SAY IT ISN'T SOs. It's like they just don't know better. You want to lovingly pat them on the heads, give them a bowl of soup and tuck them in their beds, all snug as a bug in a rug.

And, lucky for us, Frank Whaley is just the homunculus to accomplish this. As the years ravage his once-boyish face and as he gets more and more, well, “sex offendery”, he seems to only find roles as, well, sex offenders in movies like VACANCY. He's a highly irritating chigger of an actor who I grew to wholly dislike in high school when every hyper-sensitive drama clubber told me that I just “gotta see” SWIMMING WITH SHARKS, because, as the drunkard drama teacher told them, it's such “an accurate portrayal of the business!” OK, sweetie, whatever you say, just make sure that fifth-tier rip-off of GREASE comes in under budget or the whole department gets cut.

So, as bad as Whaley is as an actor, he is even worse as a screenwriter. The tired plot and boring post-9/11 New York “God, I love the majestic playfulness of this city!” BS aside, he has no concept of how real people talk, instead mixing sitcom-like “I could tell ya, but I'd have to kill ya!”-esque zingers in with faux-emo-fied “dude” situations that would make Zach Braff say “Hey, you guys are pussies.” These “coming of middle age” movies failed and went straight-to-video in the 90s, when that now-mercifully-dead indie drama boom seemed to spit out one of these a week, and, almost unknowingly, Whaley seems pathetically stuck in this era, flailing about miserably, refusing to change, adhering to what he considers, sadly, his “vision”. Sorry, Frank, but your vision is stupid.

But, on the bright side, I honestly hope that NEW YORK CITY SERENADE gains a massive cult following. I would love to see midnight showing of this, with the attention-craving throngs dressing up as Prinze and Klein, reciting the half-baked dialog, reenacting the scenes in the aisles, throwing raisins at the screen when Klein's dog “Raisin” shows up...no? Anyone?

Oh well. Just go rent SWIMMING WITH SHARKS instead. I hear it's an accurate portrayal of the business.

DAMAGED Hearing: The Best of Louis's BLACK AND READ Trip, 03.14.09

Every couple of weeks, Brother JB and I take a trip down to Denver to one of my favorite record stores, Black and Read. It's got cheap records, cheap CDs, cheap creepy books and, best of all, the friendliest, most pleasant clerks who wear Charles Manson shirts.

While many music nerds go to record stores to find lost Zappa gems and other pretentious fare, I go for, well, wacky junk. The wackier, the better. Here's this past weekend's haul, one that will surely be irritating you soon over on DAMAGED Hearing...


THE DELTA FORCE - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Now I really can't remember what the music by Alan Silvestri was like--I'm sure it's a classic, proto-typical 80s action score--but what sold me was the cover. Man, that thing is a work of art, based on the movie poster! Remember painted movie posters? You really don't see that anymore. It's now all photos and profiles shots...let's get the art of painted movie posters back!

Either way, this is getting framed after I copy the music.


POLICE ACADEMY 4: CITIZENS ON PATROL - Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack

Before I left Oklahoma City, lo those many years ago, my buddy Rod Lott, then of Hitch Magazine, now of Bookgasm fame, collaborated on an experiment slash article called "POLICE ACADEMY: Assignment Hell", wherein we watched all seven of the POLICE ACADEMY films back-to-back. When I was younger, I had a cassette copy of this soundtrack and was sure--SURE!--that the theme "Citizens on Patrol" was performed by the Fat Boys, while Rod said I was wrong. I was adamant I was right. But, looking at this record now, I realize I was totally wrong. The song was done by POLICE star Michael Winslow and the L.A. Dream Team. Congrats on the win, Rod.

Also, this album features the song "I Like My Body" by Chico DeBarge, which is just beautiful. I want to get married to it.


WHEN THE BOYS MEET THE GIRLS - The Original Soundtrack Recording

Now I have never heard of this movie, but man, only in the 60s would you get a teen-rock movie that features Connie Francis, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Louis Armstrong, Liberace AND Herman's Hermits on the same bill. It's a line-up that's after my own heart...

DAMAGED Cooking: HUEVOS RELLENOS!!!

Being Hispanic, at least 75% of my diet consists of, or at least some variation of, Mexican food. It's the one Latino stereotype that I honestly live up to. Well, that and being five foot ten with a mild case of hypertrichosis.

Extreme hair growth aside, as I now think about it, since I grew up in Texas and Oklahoma, I actually prefer "Tex-Mex" cuisine to "authentic" Mexican food, but, really, it's all the same. You got some tortillas, you got some beans and you got three cars that don't work on your front lawn. Ole'.

The thing that sucks with this diet is that I can't really go out to eat Mexican food anymore and all the home-grown recipes that I have struggled to perfect, short of opening up my own restaurant, are now null and void. I have to start from scratch. I have to take all of my old masterpieces and make them more, you know, "not-kill-me-in-my-sleep" friendly. But, as I'm learning, it's actually pretty fun. It's a DIY culinary class.



So I had a handful of huge chilis and, after the whole wonderful stuffed bell pepper experiment, wanted to try something that even when I was eating horribly I wouldn't attempt, mostly for how labor intensive they are: the mythical chili relleno. But, if you know anything about chili rellenos, they are not very good for you. Like, at all. So, I had to work my los magicos.



I roasted the chilis for a while, waiting for the skins to pop, and then rotate them until the other side pops. When you hear the popping, place the chilis in a Ziploc bag and let them steam for a while. When a while finally passes, skin the chilis like they were in the cast of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. SKIN THEM, I SAY!



Once the green skins are removed, cut a slit longways and lovingly, almost erotically, put a handful of a mixture of 2% cheddar and 2% mozzarella inside. Now here is where the whole recipe goes BAZZERK: you're supposed to make a crazy, fatty batter using eggs and lard and frying pans and well, tasty death. Instead, I pissed on the graves of my macho Latino ancestors and decided to make kind of a Mexican quiche-type thing--HUEVOS RELLENOS, if you will!



So, using only egg whites, I whipped up a batter filled with my secret blend of 15-20 spices and poured them into the Pyrex dish, liberally basting over the awaiting, quivering chilis. I them put another handful or two of cheese to bake. I then cooked for about, oh man, like 30 minutes. The wait was interminable.



When done, top with parsley and green onions just to show how badass a cook you are.



Plate with some fat-free sour cream, some fat-free refried beans and Spanish rice made with tomatoes, jalapenos and whole grain rice. Add more parsley for the full effect! And yes, this tasted incredible. If you were to ever come over to my house for dinner, and I wanted to impress you, this is what I would make.

CIRCUIT BREAKER: The Final Days of Circuit City!

CIRCUIT BREAKER: The Final Days of Circuit City!
By Louis Fowler

Last Sunday, the Circuit City in Fort Collins closed down for good. It's just one of over 500 US Circuit City stores to vacate the premises, and I can honestly say that it's been a long time coming.

I have a great consumer past with Circuit City: I bought my first cassette player there, I bought my first CD player there, and I bought my first DVD player there. While Best Buy has always been my first choice for CDs and DVDs, when it came to electronics at great prices, City was actually a decent place to make a purchase. They always stuck to their promises and lived up to their service plans. But these memories were from over five years ago. Times have most definitely a-changed.

In Oklahoma City, up until the time I left in 200-something, Circuit City never carried media. It was strictly electronics and, having since switched completely to Best Buy around then, as I had all the electronic accoutrements I needed, really never had a reason to go there. Best Buy has done their damnedest to beat, or at least match, Circuit City's prices; they go out of their way to make them your first choice in consumer electronics. Why go to Circuit City when Best Buy has gone out of their way to accommodate me?

But, even so, it was only about three years ago when I did start going back to Circuit City, mostly because I started to take notice of the spectacular DVD deals advertised in their Sunday circular. They were, if I'm not mistaken, the first of the superstores to break the $3.99 DVD barrier, selling the “unspecial” editions of movies, DVDs that would eventually be re-released months later with scads of features. I had no problem with this, as sometimes I just wanted the movie; problem was that when you actually went into Circuit City to pick up a couple of these deals—that Sunday, no less—they would always be “out of stock” or “on back order”. The first couple of times I chalked it up to low stock, but by the fifth time, I knew that it was a regular thing. I talked to other customers and people in online forums, only to learn that my problem wasn't out of the ordinary.



To rub salt in the wound, Circuit City, unlike Best Buy, doesn't offer rain-checks and I only found that information out after being dealt with by the worst employees outside of a ghetto mall’s Sbarro's. While Best Buy actually seemed to educate their employees on new products, release dates and the like, Circuit City seemed to hire from only the best alternative high-school job fairs, employing the laziest, most careless teens available. When I asked about the rain-check, the young man with the Serj Tankian beard didn't know what a rain-check was, so he called his supervisor. His supervisor didn't know, so he called a manager. The manager didn't know, so he called a general manager. It was a spot-on real-life reenactment of that MR. SHOW skit about the guy who needs change. (And, no, they didn’t offer rain-checks.)

Besides being unknowledgeable, Circuit City employees committed, to me, an even greater sin: outright laziness. At Best Buy, when they check the computer and it says they have a title in stock but it's not on the floor, they always say “It may be in the back, or on the truck. Let me go look.” Now whether they do actually go look is something else altogether, but at least they offer, go back to some room behind an “Employees Only” door and disappear for a few minutes. I appreciate that. I appreciate them giving me al least the impression that they cared.

Circuit City employees, on the other hand, would simply say “It's not back there.” or, when you ask them to check, sigh extra-loudly. Thanks for the help, Chad! Sorry to take you away from hitting on the sorority chick who wants to “maybe” buy a copy of 13 GOING ON 30 and case of Fire Dog energy drink. (Oh yes, Fire Dog had their own energy drink. Obviously the employees weren't drinking it.)



For the last year, with the exception of maybe stopping in for a few minutes just to look around, I really avoided buying anything there. And, as far as those low-price CDs and DVDs go, well, Best Buy offers price matching, so knowing that Circuit City wouldn't have what I was carrying anyway, I just took the circular over to the Best Buy customer service desk and got the product—which was in-stock, by the way—for the lower price. I foiled you again, Circuit City!

In retrospect, I had seen Circuit City in such a maddening decline for so long, that it's no surprise that they are over and out. And you know what? They deserve it. Circuit City deserves to be a dead business and its employees deserve to be standing in the bread lines. This is what Circuit City gets; they have been coasting for so long, treating customers with sheer indifference and bait-n-switching at every opportunity, it's no wonder consumers have made Best Buy their sole entertainment store. I know I have. Circuit City should be held up as a model for how to totally demolish your customer base in one fail swoop.

So that brings me to the past few weeks. As they attempted to liquidate their entire stock, curious media-vultures such as I made numerous trips to pick the Circuit City carcass clean. Every time you went in, the prices dipped lower and lower—games, CDs and DVDs started at 30% off and ended, with what was left, at 90%. And I, admittedly, made out like a bandit. With about $100-200 of merch in my basket each visit, I walked out happily paying maybe $20-30 for all the booty. I got games I had wanted, DVDs that had eluded me and CDs that I forgot about. Their loss was most definitely my gain.

Last Sunday was that last day of business. All the remaining merchandise had been moved up front in a very small area. Funny enough, the remaining CDs and DVDs—90% off—consisted mostly of "black" entertainment (hundreds of copies of the new Mary J. Blige, too many editions of GIRLFRIENDS Season 2 and handfuls of Spike Lee's SCHOOL DAZE) and WWE box-sets with names like WWE INTIMIDATION 2007, or something to that effect. I had long purged the store and, walking out empty-handed, turned this final trip into a bittersweet goodbye. Sure, I could have bought a USB cable for 49 cents, or a mouse-pad covered with dolphins for roughly the same price, but Circuit City had enough of my money. They're dead and buried and you know what? Good riddance. You really should have checked that stock-room, Chad.



But, hey Best Buy: just because you’re the only guy in town, don’t think I’ll take the same treatment. I’ve been ordering more and more from Amazon lately…

DAMAGED Cooking: Louis's "Kinda OK for You" Baco-Ribs!!!

As many regular readers of this blog may know, I am trying my best to eat better. And, even more so, I am trying to prove that just because food is healthy doesn't mean it has to taste like Dom DeLuise's bicycle shorts. Everyday, I am in the kitchen, learning to prepare delicious, low-fat meals that the whole family can enjoy. And where does most of my inspiration come from? Super-fatty foods that I once formerly enjoyed. Take, for example, smoked ribs wrapped in slices of smoked bacon.





Of course, I can't do that the old-school way. How do I solve the problem? Good-for-you turkey bacon (is there anything the turkey can't do? Besides fly...) and pork ribs that I have tried my best to trim the fat off of. It was pretty hard to do, but I tried and sliced my finger in the process, blood squirting all over the meat, the spices burning the severed skin ever so painfully. When I say my blood and tears go into my food, I mean it.

(Also, if you ate some of these ribs, you ate some of my blood. Sorry you had to find out this way. To be fair, my last AIDS test came back negative. But, then again, that was six years ago...)



Bacon-wrapped and homemade sauce and spices covering the meat, I gingerly placed the ribs in my best friend--no, not Hoogie--but my wonderful Brinkmann meat-smoker. Also, here's a tip to create a better FLAVA: when you put water in the smoker's water-pan, fill it only halfway with water and the other half with apple juice. Inventive! Also, for extra, extra flavor, use mesquite wood. Or, be a jerk and use pine or whatever. What do I know, right?





After about three or four hours of constant, steady smoking, here's what they look like:



The bacon was crispy, with the sauce cooked right on it. The bacon didn't really fall off; instead it effortlessly clung to the meat, easily mingling with every rib bite. The ribs themselves were extraordinarily juicy, the bacon trapping in the juices and sealing in the FLAVA! Really, this is the only way to cook and eat ribs and I declare that not only is every other way to cook them wrong, but if you serve them to me in any other way, I will throw the the ribs on the ground, stomping on them with a Baptist-style religious fervor and then scolding you roundly with a backhanded face-slap, but I will also steal your car, using it to commit certain vehicular crimes, and, quite possibly, stuffing a dead hooker in the truck, framing you for the murder by placing your bloody driver's license in her cold hand.

THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY: Satan should have a booth at the school job fair.

THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY
Starring Haley Bennett, Chace Crawford, AnnaLynne McCord
Directed by Mickey Liddell
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Review by Louis Fowler

There's two great things about turning eighteen: you can finally buy those Camel Ultra-Lights without blowing the 7-11 clerk and, if you're Molly Hartley, finding out that your parents made a Faust-lite deal with Satan to turn you into an unholy emissary of evil. That's an even better present than a new yellow Range Rover, if you ask me!

This is the idea behind the teeny-screamer THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY—a misleading title as there are no hauntings to be had at all—but really, that's the least of this movie's problems. It perfectly follows the moderately successful PG-13 horror formula: sullen girl with parental issues, constant jump scares made by cats and alarm clocks that wake characters from their nightmares and, of course, no real horror element until the last, well, fifteen minutes of this 84-minute movie.

Do the screenwriters of these movies have some sort of secret MAD LIBS-esque template they pass around to each other? Every single scene in this movie is every single scene you've ever seen in every single teen horror movie ever! It's like they took every single cliché possible and dumped it here—if it wasn't for the lack of painful scrotum gags, I'd think it was a parody written by Friedberg and Seltzer.

The sickly-pale Haley Bennett is the titular (and titless) Molly Hartley, a sullen well-to-do young lady who is about to turn eighteen. She's recently moved to a new town, a new prep-school and, if that's not bad enough, she starts having random nosebleeds. Like, gross, but hey, that's how you know Satan's got a finger on you, I guess.

The school, Huntington Prep, is beautifully populated by a crash-course in teen stereotypes: the Jesus-loving outcast nerd girl who you know will go bat-shit by the end, usually while quoting out-of-context Bible verses; the bad girl with the ripped stockings who you know is the bad girl because her stockings are ripped—how punk and non-conformist!; the bitchy prom queen who dates the popular good-looking rich guy, and, best of all, the popular good-looking rich guy who is understanding, charming and throws only the “bossest” of parties. In 1987 he would have been essayed by Andrew McCarthy, but in 2009, he's portrayed by an actor named, I kid you not, Chace Crawford—you gotta wonder why his parents just didn't name him “Date Rapist” and get it over with.

So while school sucks for Molly, her home-life sucks even worse: seems a few months ago mom went a bit crazy, ranting on about how the only way to “save” Molly was to kill her, stabbing her in her flat chest. Sadly, it didn't work, because there's a movie called THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY.

She sulks about the house, listening to nondescript female singer-songwriters sing despondent ballads over the soundtrack, while her dad is trying to keep the family together, starting a new job and bringing home delicious, expensive Chinese food every night, stuff like chow mein, Kung Pao chicken and a plateful of egg rolls, all served in those cool carry-out boxes you never see in real life. If my dad was alive and brought me home delicious, expensive Chinese food every night, I would be the best son possible, but, because Hollywood screenwriters prefer to make teenage girls insufferable twats, she treats him like crap throughout the whole movie. What a waste of wontons!

It's pretty much rinse-lather-repeat for the next, oh, hour, as Molly acts indifferent and gets nosebleeds repeatedly. I had totally forgotten this was even a horror film until the last few minutes when we learn that Molly died as a baby on the restroom floor of a Chinese restaurant, of course, and, in a fit of desperation, her parents make a deal with Ol' Scratch, or, at the very least, one of his lawyers, to keep her somewhat alive until her eighteenth birthday, whereupon she will go to work for Lucifer, Inc. Now exactly what the Devil wants to do with an eighteen year old girl who has a bad attitude, a poor work ethic and absolutely no marketable job skills is beyond me, but hey, he works in mysterious ways. It's still better than McDonald's, I guess.

When originally released, MOLLY was touted as having a surprise ending and, to it's credit, it does have an ending that is really surprising, but don't worry M. Night, your career is safe. (The surprise ending, by the way, is that she accepts her fate and takes the Devil's job offer. C'mon, don't get mad—you weren't really going to go out and rent this, were you?)

For anyone who is reading this, THE HAUNTING OF MOLLY HARTLEY has nothing to offer to anyone in anyway, although one critic's review said that it would be “perfect for slumber parties”. I disagree. This is the type of film that girls at slumber parties will rent, get bored half-way through and then, looking for entertainment, start making out with each other...

OK, I take it back; in that case, MOLLY is the perfect film for slumber parties! I'll bring the Pop-Secret, you bring the Carmex!