Dickshark (2016) - Movie Review

 

”Ben-Hur, the 1959 cinematic epic, is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. It is also three-and-a-half hours long, so between my disliking of overlong cinema and general attention span issues ingeneral, I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet and I’m not even sure if I will. Yeah, I may do my background research where I can, but even I have limits.”

Yeah, I had a feeling that those words would come back to bite me in the arse before too long. We’re talking about Bill Zebub once again, the only director who seems to be trying to push the aestheticisation of rape as well as the king of cringingly slow and awkward sex scenes, and this looks to be something of a new landmark for the guy. I could point to Zebub’s own blurb for the film saying that it is “the most absurd movie that [he] has ever created”, but that’s not why I consider it as such. No, this one marks new levels for his filmography because the film I’m going to talk about today, the rather humourously titled Dickshark, is almost three hours long. The Uncut version available on Vimeo is not only the only copy of the film I could secure in time for a review but it’s also a version that is markedly longer than what will be found on the DVD/Blu-Ray copies of the film. Yeah, I can’t help but feel that this is karma for complaining about long run times in the past. Still, I made it a point of reviewing both of Zebub’s works last year so might as well keep going from here.

Top 20 Diamanda Hagan Reviews

She’s an official friend of the blog, she gave me my first ever podcast appearance (and my second), she’s probably one of the few proper allies I have within the realm of media criticism. And yet, if you are ever unfortunate to catch me watching one of her videos concerning Doctor Who, you would see fanboy rage the likes of which even God has never seen before. Seriously, if I lacked any form of perspective, I could easily make up a Top 10 Worst Videos list made up of her Twatty Who Reviews. But this is something I’ve even talked with her before on the podcast, so this is hardly anything new. So, with that little dummy spit out of the way, let’s get into the list already.

Nightmare On Elmo's Street (2015) - Movie Review

What is it about puppets that fascinates us so much? I mean, the outreach of Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop is staggering, between the Muppets, Sesame Street and their other miscellaneous works. Maybe it’s as an extension of our reaction to ventriloquist dummies and how a decent performer can convince an audience that the object made of felt with a hand shoved up its rear, or maybe it’s because we are willing to accept some aspects of the Uncanny Valley which some of the better puppets can reach; either way, it has served as a source of comedy for a long time now. Of course, being the age that we live in, they have also been used to further the tradition of taking all that is child-friendly and twisting them until the heads of their souls drop off. Whether it’s the transgressive humour of Meet The Feebles, the bitingly relatable musical Avenue Q or the numerous YouTube accounts that have made use of how relatively cheap it can be to make puppets, the more adult audiences have been able to enjoy this phena-mahna (da-doo-da-doodoo) as well. Time for our first dive into the realm of all things fuzzy on this blog, as we take another look at the filmography of Bill Zebub and, at least in my case, hope for something a bit better than last time.

Loving A Vegetable (2015) - Movie Review

No-one will ever be able to predict how much I’ve wanted to talk about the director of today’s film on this blog, because this is truly one of those oddities that you can only stumble across by sheer accident: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of Bill Zebub. For this one, I once again have friend of the blog Diamanda Hagan to thank, as she reviewed not one but three of the man’s films: Forgive Me For Raping You, Zombiechrist and Dolla Morte, the last review of which looked so insane that I just had to find out for myself and wound up purchasing the film on DVD.

Cut to a few months ago, and my mother texting me if I had heard about the film ‘Antfarm Dickhole’, no doubt the most infamous of his filmography. I then ran straight into her room, clutching my copy of Dolla Morte and proceeded to educate her a bit more on the subject. After trying (and failing) to convince her to watch it with me, I went to the mighty Google and found out that he had two new films out this year. As if I needed a better excuse to check out more from Zebub. Let’s get started with today’s subject: This is Loving A Vegetable… which, in terms of film names, is about as innocuous as Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling. I can only hope that it doesn’t involve mating with produce.