TheAvod is opposed to bullying!

Bullying - it's a difficult subject to broach, which is why we gloss over it while talking about a movie that involves a bully getting revenge on his tormentors from beyond the grave! The name of that movie? Tormented. Clever, right?

Anyhoo, check out that review and a couple other by right-clicking here to download the new episode!

Then meet me here next week for more movie madness!

Haiku! Starring Blitz!

Today I'll be utterly misusing a Japanese art to review the film:

There's far too much plot.

This was based on a novel?

I understand now.

The Eightieth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

These stories are only ever 4-5 pages long, consisting of a maximum of sixty panels. Not a lot of space to tell a story. Yet the creators were so fond of then-contemporary rapid fire banter that they waste two panels on a text approximating the effect, even though the dialogue contributes nothing to the story!

Bravo!

Tales From the Darkside 310: Deliver Us From Goodness

Okay, finally - a title where I have no idea what the episode is going to be about! Even the opening image, of a plate being set for a fancy dinner party offers no clues. Come on, Tales, surprise me!

It turns out that the show is taking place in the home of a man running for mayor - they've invited a prospective supporter over for dinner! As they get settled in the manager complains about his allergies - will that be important? Then it's time for dinner - the manager explains that in order to get elected, the whole family has to be presentable and positive. This might be problematic in the case of the odd-looking and gawky daughter-

When the mother starts talking about the value of supporting men who would strive for greatness she's suddenly underlit-

Which turns out not to be just a director's flourish, as the other characters comment on it. She plays off the comment, and doesn't even answer questions about heavenly music that plays whenever she speaks. Things get even stranger when the manager complains about the meal, and states that he'd have preferred fried chicken. The wife's wish makes it so, and a buck of KFC drops onto his plate.

Faced with the supernatural, the manager takes his leave in the fastest way possible. Who can blame him? The next day the family still hasn't received a satisfactory answer about the whole 'magical powers' thing. The daughter talks about the salacious adventures of her friends' parents, but her super-classy mother won't be phased. She will, however, use her magical powers to transform her daughter's clothes into that of Cleopatra after a miscommunication.

This, understandably, freaks everyone out, and the father is finally willing to talk openly about the situation - he points out that the mother promised that this sort of thing 'wouldn't happen any more'. What's that kind of thing? Apparently she doesn't even know!

Huh? Ringer Edition!

From time to time, a line of dialogue appears in a show's script that winds up onscreen, even though enough elements of the scene that contained it have changed that a rewrite should have been necessary.

In the pilot episode of "Ringer", at the end of an NA meeting, Sarah Michelle Gellar's boyfriend/sponsor questions whether it's too late for her to be drinking coffee. Nothing wrong with that if the scene had been filmed as it was doubtlessly written to be, at night.

That, obviously, wasn't the case:

An awful lot of light streaming through the window, isn't there? That's because the window isn't just facing an extremely bright parking lot, but rather it's the middle of the afternoon. Check out this next scene set some time later.

The script isn't carved into stone, you know. You can always change a few words if conditions on the ground change. Unless you're not paying attention. Which is a possibility, this being Ringer and all.

That Happy Cat!

Oh, Snowball - you get disrespected quite a bit by this show, don't you? Lisa's cat has been dead for around four years when the show begins - the official number is given in a Halloween episode, so there's room for a little shakiness. Speaking of that Halloween Episode (Treehouse of Horror III, specifically), something puzzling occurs - while the characters discuss Snowball, the cat featured here:

The picture Lisa holds up is of Snowball II-

Even more puzzling, when we get to the pet cemetery, we find that the cat was buried under the name:

Snowball I? Wouldn't naming a cat that suggest it wasn't going to be long for this world? The same way that calling it the 'First Battle of Bull Run' ensured that there would be a second some years later?

Criminal Minds Season 5 Recap!

It`s a one-month-early Christmas present as we take a look back at Criminal Minds Season 5!

This was a weaker than usual season for the team, with two zero-scoring episodes! Is this a record? That sounds like something I should check!

Anyhoo, the season-ender was a cliffhanger, and therefore not scored, but the rest of the episodes involved a crime being solved, and therefore count. The total score for the season was 45/220, for a 20% profiling rate. Truly, from a psychological standpoint, this was the worst season of Criminal Minds.

The best episode, surprisingly, was the Suspect Behaviour spinoff showcase, in which the team actually used a description of the kind of person they're looking for in an environment small enough that it could help identify the killer - when there were no other clues available! Everything else about that episode was egregiously bad, but at least there were a couple of positives.

The worst episode, naturally, was '100', in which instead of catching the villain, he phoned Greg and invited him over for a fistfight. Yikes.

See you back here next time for the resolution of the Tim Curry cliffhanger! Will he kill that little girl? Almost certainly not! Will he be captured or killed? Um... duh?

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Jason Segel Edition!

Jason Segel hosted this past week, plugging his upcoming Muppet movie. I have certain misgivings about that particular project, not the least of which being that it appears to feature Rowlf, who had been retired after the death of Jim Henson as a way of honoring him. Rowlf being the first, or 'alpha', Muppet. I've got to say, appearing as a backup singer in an opening monologue song is a rather ignominious reintroduction for an historic character who's been gone for two decades.

But hey, let's move on to the objectionable! No rape jokes this week (thank Odin), and just two sketches including homophobic punchlines! This first was the kissing family, which got its biggest laugh when surprise guest Paul Rudd appeared just in time to make out with the host. The other was in a digital short, which featured a transvestite prostitute for no reason other than the cheap laugh it pried from the dark souls of the audience.

So, the numbers!

Rape - 0
Homophobia - 2

You know, I'm really happy that SNL is cleaning up its act, and hope to see this trend continue off into the future. That doesn't mean I won't continue keeping an eye on it, however. I'm watching you, SNL.

Next week - Nothing! Because it's Thanksgiving! The week after that, Steve Buscemi - which should be interesting, to say the least.

TheAvod PlaceHolder!

After watching three utterly random movies, the DM and myself discovered that while Gacy and Sherlock Holmes underperform, there's way more to say about a movie called Butchered than anyone could possibly guess in a thousand years. Also, it's possible that the only joy that can be gleaned from American Horror Story is in trying to figure out the rules of its world.

For these stories - and many others - simply right-click here to download the latest episode of TheAvod!

The Seventy-Ninth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

Now, I'm no spy hunter, but do you think there's a chance it could be the guy who didn't know the right word to say?

Tales From the Darkside 309: Baker's Dozen

Finally, an episode where the title doesn't give away the game! Unless this is actually about a baker who gives someone a cursed 13th muffin. That can't be it, can it?

Well, it does open in a Bakery, where an elderly man serves up a tray of cookies while lamenting his lot in life - still working while old: tragedy! Fun note - this episode was written by George A. Romero!

As the old man takes a break from complaining a man arrives at the door. It's Rick from Magnum PI, making his second appearance on the show! He's there to see the woman who owns the shop, who's extremely confident about the medicinal qualities of her baked goods. Rick agrees about the magical qualities of her goods, and proposes franchising the business, bringing her incredible cookies to the whole world! The old lady isn't very interested, so naturally Rick does the only logical thing and threatens her with stealing the recipe - he imagines that whatever's in the cookies that makes them so special can be measured and quantified by lab technicians, then replicated somewhere else.

It's like he's never seen an episode of one of these things, isn't it? Not that I think they're going to chop him up and turn him into cookies of course, but he's obviously misunderestimated the literally magical properties of the cookies he loves so well.

The old lady saw Rick coming, of course. She's unimpressed with the idea of partnership, but reconsiders a little when Rick explains that he doesn't want a piece of her business - just her advertising account. He even shows her a mockup of an ad-

Which impresses her for some reason that escapes me. Isn't it supposed to be 'Country Sunshine'? People rarely contrasts the City and the County.

A Lingering Question About Tucker and Dale vs. Evil!

Who was the other killer? Over the course of the film, we hear quite a bit about the Memorial Day Massacre, and even learn that one of the perpetrators of it was the villain's father:

One problem, though - what happened to the other killer? We know that there were two killers because, in the villain's flashback, they are clearly visible:

Now, one might say that this is the consequence of his status as an unreliable narrator, but since the story came from his granparents, who presumably heard it from his institutionalized mother, it's pretty trustworthy. Beyond that, consider Tucker's cabin-

It was clearly the property of the Memorial Day Massacrer, and since the cops caught one of them, but never found the cabin and all the evidence inside, it must have been the property of the second killer.

So Tucker bought the cabin from the other killer. Will this, combined with the survival of this film's villain, provide the foundation for a potential sequel's plot? We can only hope!

What's that? More Simpsons Things I Noticed?

In the Simpsons episode 'Sunday Cruddy Sunday', better known as 'The Other Super Bowl Episode', Marge and Lisa have a subplot while the boys are off dealing with all that football mishegoss. They have some trouble with a Vincent Price-approved egg-decorating kit, and call a hotline, where a recording of Price leaves a very confusing message.

What's so odd about this? At the end of the sequence, Lisa asks Marge to clarify whether Price is alive or dead. Which is a good question to ask, based on the convolutions in the message. Except for one thing - Lisa didn't hear the message. The entire time Marge was on the phone she held the handset up to her ear, while Lisa stood nearby. So how did Lisa know what was being said?

Criminal Minds 523: Our Darkest Hour

Scratchy travelogue footage plays as an RV drives across America while Leonard Cohen plays on the soundtrack! It seems that this killer has excellent taste in music. Or at least the music supervisor on the show does. The killer is simply listening to news radio, where he hears that a blackout is planned for that night in LA because of a heat advisory. So the killer (TIM CURRY!) waits outside a large house until the lights go out and heads inside to do some murdering.

It seems no one noticed a crappy, run-down RV parked in the middle of an upper-class neighbourhood and called the police. Which is entirely plausible. Also plausible? That someone would hear a crash downstairs during a blackout and not immediately call the police. Do they not recognize that blackouts are the most popular occasions for thieves to strike? Of course they don't, they're teaser victims on an episode of Criminal Minds, they have no internal lives.

The team is going to head out to LA to deal with this situation, because in addition to the murdered husband and raped wife, two other women were raped and murdered earlier in the week. So it's off to LA to stop Tim Curry before he kills again!

I'm kidding, of course, this is a season-ender, which means it's going to be a cliffhanger. The only one that wasn't was season 2, which was the second part of a two-parter. Since this isn't that, and this season hasn't set up a Reaper who can swoop in right before the credits, it looks like we've got at least one more episode of Tim to look forward to! And the Asian cop who's their LA liason, I assume. Let's check in with him after the opening credits!

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Emma Stone Edition

So, let's consider tonight's episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by one 'Emma Stone'. The host, unusually willing to go all-in for massively unflattering comedic characters, and thereby embiggening otherwise lacklustre scripts. The millionth appearance of Wiig's moronic game show contestant character would have been a complete disaster had Stone not rescued the sketch by shamelessly making out with her ventriloquist's dummy.

It was an odd week.

But a tasteful one! Perhaps cowed by the news out of Pen State, there were absolutely no rape jokes this week - and Seth Meyers even managed to cover the story tastefully! We are truly living in an age of miracles and wonderment.

The numbers:

Rape Jokes: 0
Homophobia-based jokes: 1

Congratulations, SNL! Another decent week! Hopefully when Jason Segel hosts next week you can keep this streak going!