Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Jennifer Lopez Edition

J. Lo.’s triumphant return to the stage at SNL proved to be one of the cleanest episodes of the year – not only were there no rape jokes of any kind, but even the two gay jokes were largely harmless!

This relative cleanliness gives me a golden opportunity to mention one of the other recurring sketches I have a problem with: ESPN Classic. If you haven’t seen the specific sketch I’m talking about it doesn’t matter, because they’re all exactly the same. Two guys fail at describing women’s sports, and make crude jokes about women’s hygiene.

I find these sketches so unpleasant that I’ve been tempted to add a ‘MisogynyWatch’ to the regular posting – but I haven’t yet because of the overt misogyny of the show is so far restricted to just this one recurring sketch. Like how I wouldn’t have started the RapeWatch if the only time rape came up was the despicable endlessly returning ‘Scared Straight’ sketches.

I am weirdly fascinated by this sketch, though, because of its similarity to a great moment from Alan Partridge, which, thanks to the magic of Youtube, you can see embedded below.

The Twelfth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

It's another dispatch from the Golden Age - in this one we learn that there's nothing funnier than suicide!

Again, children's comic.

Lake Mungo Is Almost Too Good

Time for a bit of a departure here at the Castle – instead of only being motivated by hatred and contempt, I’m going to make an effort to write about a subject that I actually enjoy. Weird, right? So, without any further ado, let’s take a dip in Lake Mungo!

Okay, one more bit of ado – I just wanted to point out that I seriously opened this post with a bad pun, and then apologize for that.

Sorry. Now let’s move on…

To the sunny shores of Lake Mungo!

The disturbing moral lessons of Numb(three)rs and Medium

My fandom for actor Peter MacNicol ensured that I would tune in to Numb(three)rs when it premiered some six years back. I found the show to be a passable procedural, barely worth mentioning, let alone remembering. Still, the inertia of storytelling kept me watching for the next few seasons, even as I began to grow unsettled by the show’s lacklustre storytelling, terribly-used science, and its habit of borrowing its plots rather shamelessly from other shows and popular films.

This came to a head at the beginning of season five, when an episode so closely remade the plot of a film that the writers’ arrogance triggered a kind of reflexive disgust in me, and I haven’t watched an episode since (save for the time Gregg Henry was on, because hey, Gregg Henry).

Thinking back I can’t imagine the episode was as bad as I remember, but its obviousness was just too much to bear. If you don’t believe me, just check out ‘Blowback’, or as I call it: “The Numb(three)rs theatre players present: LA Confidential - The TV Show!”.

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Galfinakis Edition

It’s time for the glorious return of the Saturday Night Live RapeWatch, which has been on a hiatus due to my depression with the overall terribility of the show, save for the Jon Hamm edition, which featured all of the brilliant comedy we’ve come to expect of him, and not enough objectionable material to warrant me getting angry enough to write about.

We’re back now, though, so let’s take a look at Zach Galfinakis’ first outing as a host of SNL!

Criminal Minds 209: The Last Word

If the beginning of this episode of Criminal Minds is to be believed, some people are just too stupid to live. A family is out picnicking in the park, and while the wife is alone at the table for a moment a mysterious man runs out of the words and announces that his daughter has disappeared. So what does the woman do? Does she yell and run to the crowd of people fifty feet away, hoping to gather a large group of people that can quickly locate this missing child?

Nope, she follows a stranger into the woods.

I’m not saying she deserved to get murdered and then have her corpse raped by the fake Green River Killer, but come on. There’s a bare minimum of personal safety that you have to maintain to deserve being taken seriously as a sentient human being, and she just performed the serial killer equivalent of walking blindfolded out into traffic.

Later that night a prostitute is woken up by her son – once she realizes what time it is she races out the door to get to work. Only to wind up gunned down my a mysterious toque-wearing figure!

Are the two killers the same man? Probably not, but I guess we’ll find out after the opening credits!

Criminal Minds 208: Empty Planet

This episode opens with a ‘bang’… by which I mean a montage of a dude making some pipe bombs, calling in a warning to the news, and then doing this with them-

So who is this crazed bomber, and what is he trying to stop with his explosions?

Let’s find out after the credits!

The Eleventh-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

This is what was wrong with Inglorious Bastards. At no point in the movie did someone fly a plane low enough that its propeller decapitated a German Officer.

Just putting that out there.

Although, technically, that's Commando Yank's 'GyroSub', and not actually an airplane.

Criminal Minds 207: North Mammon

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Criminal minds tried to get in on the whole torture porn thing. I mean, they’re kind of a horror-themed show, right?

In this case, it’s a situation where three girls are kidnapped on the night of a sleepover, which happens to be on the exact same night as a pep rally! But who’s done it? And why did they live in a town with the preposterous name of North Mammon? Why not just move down the road to Greed City, TN?

Okay, girls grabbed from a sleepover – not exactly Saw territory, I know, but believe me, it’s going somewhere. And that somewhere is in a small underground concrete chamber with adequate ventilation. The killer opens a vent to talk to them – and he wants to play a game! The rules are simple: If they do nothing, then they’ll all die of dehydration. But if one of them is murdered by the other two, those two get to leave!

Yeah, it’s one of those moral quandry deals. And one of them has a bad cold that’s going to turn into pneumonia what with her being buried alive and all, so it’s just a question of who’s go the guts to kill who?

Final Destination 4: The Final Destination

You know, when I was working on the reviews of the last three movies I gradually developed a theory that the premonitions that led people to escape their imminent deaths were being by the Ghost of Murder, solely for the purpose of his own amusement – he’s got infinite chances to kill them after all, and as only the sickest of hunters will tell you, hunting is far more pleasurable when your prey knows that they’re going to die.

It was intended as nothing more than a joke about the series’ baffling lack of an identifiable antagonist, or really any drama of any kind. Ever since the first movie it’s been a foregone conclusion that every character would die in the end – even 2’s happy ending was apparently undone in the supplemental material on part 3’s DVD, although I haven’t actually watched it to check. Tony Todd’s lines about death having a plan, and the crackpot with a book at the beginning of 2 were as close as the series ever came to giving ‘death’ a personality – the rather thin idea that ‘Death’ has a specific plan for when all living creatures were going to die, and that if you see that plan you can avoid it, at least until Death circles back around. This explanation seemed a little on the idiotic side, especially when you consider that it in no way explains the premonitions people received.

So I thought it would be funny to refer to ‘The Ghost of Murder’, a malicious spirit who arranges tragedies, then warns people about them through signs and premonitions – explaining that he was like a cat that lets a mouse go over and over just so he can catch him again and again.

Little did I know that FD4 would, whether it was intentional or not, go on to confirm my suspicions about the Ghost of Murder in their entirety. So, without any further ado, let’s take a look at Final Destination 4: The Final Destination!

Criminal Minds 206: The Boogeyman

As of the beginning of this episode Elle is still, technically, a member of the FBI. But given that everyone knows she’s a nutjob, that’s not going to last. Of course, the FBI cleared her of any culpability in the shooting, despite the fact that she was acting against orders in going to the rapist’s apartment, and no one has any idea where his gun came from.

More importantly, when Greg is ordering her into therapy and she tries to say she doesn’t need it, he doesn’t pull out the big gun – that she, whether the shooting was justified or not, created a situation where a shooting was likely to occur, and she did it for no defensible reason at all.

Elle’s headed for therapy, and off the show by the end of the hour, I’m guessing.

So, on to the plot of the episode. A bunch of kids are hanging out, listening to an older child tell a scary story about how an old man who lives in the woods killed a little boy recently. They believe the old man watches them from a haunted house atop a hill. There seems to be some truth to the story though, because while it’s being told another child is beaten to death in the woods!

The Tenth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

So, what's wrong with the following picture?


Yes, that's right. If that's what the frog's statement translates to, why isn't it a question?

Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder on Ice!

Ah, FD3 – the movie in the series that I have the most contempt for (to date). Now while it’s true that most of this contempt is due to the relative lack of Tony Toddity in the film (he appears in two brief vocal cameos), it also has to do with the film’s utter failure to make any kind of sense at all. As proof, I give you – the disaster that kicks off the plot:

Wendy and friends climb aboard a devil-themed rollercoaster whose voice is provided by Tony Todd. While they’re being strapped in the hydraulic system that keeps the seat arms in place springs a bit of a leak-

Letting us know that it’s not the best-maintained ride in the state. Then an a-hole further back on the ride asks the hot girls in front of them to flash him while they’re going through the loop – although I’m not entirely clear how he thinks this could possibly happen, both because he’s an ass, and the small issue of the girls having restraints on that both limit their movement and cover their breasts.

Perhaps the line is leftover from when the script imagined they would be in a more old-fashioned rollercoaster?

Criminal Minds 205: Aftermath

The story begins, as I’m beginning to understand that most stories do, at home base in Quantico, where the team is being briefed about a nefarious serial rapist. His twisted MO? He phones them and leaves a voicemail announcing that he’s standing right behind them, and then, because he’d broken into their house, he is! The already-puzzling aspect? For the first group of victims he attacked young women from a bible college, and now he’s gone after single women in their 30s… but why?

I suppose we’re going to find out after the credits, aren’t we?

Final Destination 2: The Ghost of Murder Returns

And we’re back! It’s time to take a look at Final Destination 2, which, according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer™, has been critically consensed to be the high point in the series, with a Freshness rating of 47%.

So you just know it’s going to be good, right?

Except no, it’s not. In fact, it sets up a disturbing trend which will continue into Final Destination 3: The Ghost of Murder On Ice!