Time again for our venerated… our ongoing… the… sigh. Forgive my lack of enthusiasm, confusionauts, but this monthly feature, wherein we look at the top ten search terms that brought people to Confusereviews.com in the last month, is always sort of a let-down. It’s the same damn terms month after month: that girl I wrote something about. Those sex dolls. That old man playing accordion. Is that all we are to you, internet? A place for fuck-bots with quirky senses of humor, cute haircuts and concertinas? We’re so much MORE, people. But noooo, you just want the same stuff, over and over again. Well no more! This month, I’m gonna go out of my way to break the cycle, and suggest some alternate things you can all be searching for. A breath of fresh air for all of us, some new things to obsess over, instead of…

You’ve ruined her for me, you know that? And she’s even wearing our colors! What was once a harmless schoolboy crush on a charming, funny, somewhat obscure but nonetheless cute actress has slowly, steadily curdled into dread every time I see her name, thanks to you jerks and your incessant searching. What are you, perverts? Why must EVERY month the top search be an attractive woman’s name? I’m starting to suspect that the online community has an inordinate number of individuals who spend their time googling attractive starlet’s names, for some reason. What’s really sad is that I only ever brought her up, in this very feature, to replace the LAST crush I had that was run into the ground. Oh well, history is doomed to repeat itself I guess. In that vein, you know who I think’s pretty nifty? The cat’s pajamas? The bee’s knees?

Maria Bamford. Comedienne, sometimes actress, all-around smart and funny and cute as a button. I like her. There, go nuts.

I don’t even really understand what this one refers to. A quick search brings up our article on the top 15 characters in RPGs, but the only mention of the first term in there is some joke about Mass Effect I don’t understand. As close as I can figure it, people are really looking for a similarly named computer game that appears to be a giant Counterstrike clone, only with…

Ah. I’m starting to see a trend. Okay, if that’s what you want, then check out our NRF coverage of Town and Country Surf Designs Two: Thilla’s Surfari for the NES. In it, you play as Thrilla Gorilla, a poorly thought out surfboard mascot who has to save his bikini-clad girlfriend from some witch-doctor. That’s the same thing as that other game, right?

Yes, I am aware that this is not what you meant, readers. Unfortunately (I mean fortunately) Reid has placed a pretty solid ban on me putting any more pictures of Japanese sex robots on this website. My initial article on them has done enough damage.

You like robots? Here.

The artist’s name is Stephane Halleux, and he’s an awesome French sculptor who makes steampunk robots and cars and dolls and whatnot. Cool, right? I swear, does EVERYTHING you guys search for have to be about sex?

Apparently not. I mean I hope not. I mean GOD I HOPE NOT.

Obviously this happy fellow, the midwestern polka king supreme, is the subject of the third installment in Syd’s reviews of RFDTV programming written last year. They’re good articles, give ‘em a read. But for the love of god, stop searching for this guy on the internet.

If you like weird old men on television, why not check out Danny DeVito on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

Think of it as sort of like Arrested Development only filthier. Way, WAY filthier.

Another one of Syd’s articles, and another weird situation where we’re on the first page of a google image search. Why? Didn’t anybody else watch this cartoon? It was pretty good, I thought.

You know what else is a good vividly colorful, surrealist comedy show about cooking? Food Party, on IFC.

Food Party is a cooking show (sort of) hosted by Thu Tran, a young woman who apparently resides inside a nightmare made out of felt and messes. It’s funny as hell served with oregano. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Ah, that incredibly shitty band I wrote a review about as part of my laughably abandoned new years’ resolution. As opposed to… this shitty band I wrote a review about as part of my laughably abandoned new years’ resolution. Take your pick.

This one I don’t mind so much, if only because the page it’s referencing, on our sub-site the Con-wiki, is exactly what people were looking for. EXACTLY. So kudos, you people got one out of ten right. Good job.

This one is tricky. A shitty giant animal sci-fi movie made on a measly budget and probably five hundred miles away from anything even remotely resembling talent is the kind of thing we probably WOULD review on this site, but as it stands there’s only one article that just mentions the movie.

Well this just won’t do. I hereby promise that this month, we will feature a review of Supercroc. In the meantime, you can read a really REALLY old review of a movie that’s probably exactly the same shit- FRANKENFISH.

Now we just need Frankenfish Vs Supercroc and the prophecy will be fulfilled…

Who? Oh, one of the Hee-Haw honeys, great. Again, Syd’s odyssey through RFDTV brought this about. Uh, fuck, what can I recommend instead of looking for her…

Uh…

How about this neat article about John Gochnaur, the worst baseball player of all time? Yeah, that works. Whatever.

I give up. I seriously give up, why the FUCK would we get hits for a recognizable brand and mascot that have been prominent in media for more than half a century? Here, read about mints. Fuck you.

That wraps it up for this edition of Top Ten Searches of the Month. If we haven’t lost at least ONE of these entries by next month, then I say we just say screw it and turn this site into some kind of index of “the hottest women of cable access television” and have videos of them wrestling robot crocodiles. Far be it from me to stand in the way of progress.

I CHOOSE YOU, TELLY SAVALAS!

You know the drill. Punch rock-n-roll Kojak there in the face to pull up a totally random wikipedia article for your reading pleasure. This week’s discoveries include:

Aynuk and Ayli- A pair of “mythical characters… that feature in a large number of local jokes” for the English “Black Country”. Apparently one region of Northern England, between Staffordshire and Worcestershire, has an accent that’s fucking impossible for outsider to make sense out of, and these two guys are the go-to pair for making fun of them. Kind of like an Olde-English Sven and Ole.

That could be funny, right? Here’s a sample:

Ayli was late for work and Aynuk asked him where he had been.

Ayli: “I’ve been to ‘av me ‘air cut.”
Aynuk: “In the firm’s time?”
Ayli: “Well it grows in the firm’s time, doh it?”
Aynuk: “It doh all grow in the firm’s time!”
Ayli: “I day ‘av it all cut off !”

Uh… okay. Heh, that’s… uh… funny. Because his hair grows at work, but not all of it, so he only had the… wait. How about:

Aynuk: ” Cum on Ayli wesh yer onds ya tays ni on ready, wim avin a nois bit o’ vera lynn”
Ayli “OH NO, NOT WHALE MATE AGEN”.

Haha, I get it, he’s gonna… wash his hands so they can eat whale for dinner…? Maybe it’s Olde English stoner humor, I dunno. Ayli and Aynuk go to an Actual Castle.

Diogenes of Sinope- Alright, crotchety old Greek philosophers! So Diogenes was a founding Cynic, and he was a mean old codger who slept in a bowl, jacked off in public, peed on people he was angry at and did public stunts like carry a lantern around in the daytime “looking for an honest man”. He rejected… well, looks like everything, actually. Except dogs. He liked dogs.

Also, “he regularly argued with Plato, disputing his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaging his lectures.” That’s awesome. Imagine Plato, one of the most respected philosophers of all time, discussing life and the universe on the steps of the academy with his disciples- such a grand, respectable image. Then imagine there’s some half-naked old crazy jerk who lives in a bathtub and keeps coming by throwing dead chickens at Plato and calling him a phony, and Plato just has to shake his head and try to keep going with what he was doing. A little less regal. I like that.

Another story holds that Alexander the Great came to visit Diogenes and found him looking at a pile of human bones. When asked why, Diogenes replied “I’m trying to find the bones of your father, but they’re indistinguishable from the bones of a slave”. Daaaaaamn, son. That’s the equivalent of modernly telling the president “FUCKIN’ YOUR MOM, THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING”. And then you throw dead chickens at him from a bathtub. This guy’s cool.

The Sound-Sweep- Oh good, an old short sci-fi story about a “a mute boy vacuuming up stray music in a world without it, (who) comes upon an opera singer hiding in a sewer. As all music has been outlawed and destroyed, the opera singer is obsolete.” That sounds… uh… blunt and uninteresting. Was there some law in the 60′s that said nine out of every ten works of science fiction prose had to be really clumsy metaphors for stupid shit that made no sense? I guess that’s why the absolute greats of the field like Asimov wrote thousands of things, because it was a crap-shoot back then what was going to stick and become relevant.

Although in fairness, this story inspired the lyrics to “Video Killed the Radio Star”. Whoop-de-doo.

Pants Pankuro- This entry is about an animated Japanese public television show that teaches kids about using the toilet. It stars a kid named Pants, who is apparently some kind of hippo in underwear. Oh boy, let’s watch an episode!

Watch it already!

O…kay. Honestly this is incredibly tame stuff for a Japanese cartoon, even one aimed at toddlers. The only thing I find distressing is the list of characters on the show, mostly anthropomorphic toilets and whatnot, and one eight-legged washing machine for some reason, but then there’s the last entry-

“Suberi-ika A slide that Pankuro and his friends play on outside.”

So, a talking playground slide is a character… in this educational show about going to the bathroom. There are… so many images that jump to mind about how such a character would be used… and none of them are pleasant.

The Philadelphia Experiment- Hooray for conspiracy theories! If you’ve never heard of it before, the Philidelphia experiment was supposedly the testing of some made-up fake technology (that worked off of unified field theory… somehow…) on the U.S.S. Eldridge in October of 1943. Intended to make battleships invisible, it instead did any of a number of goofy stupid things, like turning the ship into a green fog or teleporting it across the ocean or sending it back in time, and in most versions horrible things happened to the crew like fusing them to the ship or I dunno, turning them into dinosaurs made of noodles. Whatever happened, OBVIOUSLY the government covered it up and brainwashed all the people involved.

It’s impossible to know for sure. Maybe even YOU were aboard that day! Do you remember where you were in the fall of 1943? NO!? GASP! Are you a dinosaur made of noodles!? DOUBLE GASP!

—

So, what should we take away from today’s batch of kid-tested, Savalas-approved random info? I don’t know about you, but I want to start a Japanese cartoon show about a dystopian future where pooping is outlawed, and we follow the exploits of a crotchety old homeless man and his sidekick, an anthropomorphic bathtub who can turn himself invisible and travel through time. They mostly make jokes about how farmers have funny accents and throw dead chickens at the president. And every episode is a minute long.

Sadly, judging from what I know about Anime, this idea probably already exists. Oh well.

So it’s been a month since we did an NRF, who cares? You still remember what it means, right? Nintendo ROM Friday? Not NES ROM Friday (like the original brilliant name was) because now we do Game Boy Games too. For instance, today’s game is Mario’s Picross, which is the sort of boring puzzle game that it could’ve only been made for the Game Boy. I chose this game because I remember wiling away the hours back when I was a child visiting relatives and there was nothing to do but play the NES Back to the Future game (which is impossible) or play the only Game Boy game around: Mario’s Picross. Oh the hours I’ve spent…

I hear you now, you whiny son of a bitch, “What the fuck is Picross?” you ask? Well, according to the tutorial where Mario is inexplicably wearing an explorer’s helmet, “The mystery lies in the numbers!” Basically, you have a grid with some numbers on it, and the numbers tell you how many of the spaces in that line, horizontal or vertical, that you have to chisel out. For instance, in the tutorial demonstration over there, a 5 means to chisel out the whole row or column, because it’s a 5×5 grid. If there are more than one number, that means there’s at least one blank space between the two groups of chiseled-out blocks. Got it? It’s really easy, actually, and it’s a pretty good time-waster. I mean, the fact that they give you a half hour to complete every puzzle is a pretty good indication that they expect you to spend some time on it.

In total, there are 146 puzzles to do, none of which will ever take anywhere even close to thirty minutes to complete. I’d say they take more like 10-15 minutes, but that’s just me. If you hit the wrong block, it knocks off a couple minutes, so I guess that’s really the only way to lose. I was going to let one of these run out to get a game over screen, but I just didn’t have the patience to wait that long, and it’s just not possible to make enough mistakes. Seriously, this is the easiest fucking game ever. The only thing that even starts to approach interesting about Mario’s Picross is the really terrible pixel art that they have you create, half of which are just random blocks of things. Or maybe I just don’t have an artistic eye, I guess. Why don’t we take a look at a few finished designs and then y’all can tell me just how crazy I am, SHALL WE?!

Ah, okay, that’s a star. One of those little Mario invincibility stars, even! Okay, no problem. What was I even talking about?!

And that’s… a shoe. Yeah, a high heel shoe. With a lasso on the top of it, I guess. I can tell it’s a high heel shoe because it doesn’t look like a human foot could possibly fit into it.

And this is… a bowling ball bag? Or maybe a barn of some sort. Yeah, one of those ones that have all the windows and there’s a little chimney or something? Yeah, that’s obviously what it is. Wait, the game says that it’s bread. Huh.

Okay, I got this one no problem. That’s one of the guys from Daft Punk, right? He’s got his little Cylon visor and like a speaker thing for the mouth. Either that, or it’s a butt with a strap on it, and I don’t like thinking that I spent ten minutes drawing a butt. The fucking game isn’t even a help with this one, as it just labels it “tinkle”. Uh…

Oh, this one’s obvious. It’s a volcano. Probably one of those volcano ice cream cakes, I’d say. And there’s lava flowing down the mountain, and… WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE?! It’s a goddamn jumble of nonsense! Fuck you, Mario, and fuck your fucking Picross.

It may have been a while since I did the first three parts of this (or even written anything at all that wasn’t funny videos of dogs in hats), so I’ll introduce it again. I’m a proponent of both bad movies and VHS tapes, so when I found a local store which is jam-packed of bad movies on VHS for a buck apiece, I went CRAZY! I spent forty whole bucks and probably fifty hours of my life which I’ll never get back, but at least if I can write short reviews of these bad movies, it won’t all be a COMPLETE waste. Right? RIGHT!

Roboman

I got this movie because the cover had a really goofy robot guy’s face on it, but it turns out it was EVEN GOOFIER in the real film (as seen on this DVD Widescreen DVD case). I mean, look at that guy, it looks like the Michelin Man got tin plated. The movie itself is all about Elliott Gould trying to figure out whether this robot faced guy is actually an American scientist that was captured by the Russians, then returned after a surgery (a robo-surgery) which supposedly saved his life. Not sure why nobody ever thought of that kind of espionage in real life. I mean, you just dress some other guy up in a fat robot suit and say he’s someone else, and (at least according to this movie) everybody except one guy will completely believe him! BRILLIANT!

Sleeping Dogs

I really hate this movie, and it’s for a couple reasons. First off, it’s just a dumb sci-fi action movie from the 90′s, and those are always awful. Second, it’s got C. Thomas Howell as a bad guy with a fucking terrible accent. Third, I SWEAR that I’ve seen about half of this movie in a different movie before, and I think they just spliced it in the middle of the thing… But I can’t remember the name of the other movie, so I can’t check. IT’S SO FRUSTRATING. Oh, what’s this movie about? Some prisoners on a spaceship break free and take over the spaceship, but they’re thwarted by some undercover space cop lady. Boring.

Revolt of the Dragon

Speaking of boring, how about this very standard kung fu flick? If I’m remembering correctly, it’s mostly about this guy who works in a restaurant who kicks people a lot when they try to steal from the restaurant. It’s a very, very, very standard kung fu movie. I guess I probably shoulda known.

Hands of Steel

Another kung fu movie? Oh no, this is soooo much better… This is a movie about a rogue cyborg who works at a bar (okay, it’s not ENTIRELY different) and who spends the first hour of the film in a series of tense arm wrestling matches with bike gangs. Seriously. Of course, he never loses, because he has a fucking bionic arm (though, to be honest, you don’t know that until the arm wrestling is over. Not that it makes fucking arm wrestling any more interesting). Later, the movie goes into a downward spiral (yeah, worse than arm wrestling), when the cyborg guy has to fight the people who are after him, and everyone turns out to be robots and almost everybody explodes. But you just tell me that you could see a video with that cover and NOT want to see it. I know, you can’t. YOU CAN’T! LA LA LA, I’M NOT LISTENING FUCK YOU!!

Thunder Warrior II

Unfortunately, I missed Thunder Warrior I, but I can guarantee you that that one doesn’t have the amazing tagline, “Thunder strikes twice!” This stupid action movie is about a huge, bad acting Native American guy named “Thunder” (GET IT) who gets arrested for no reason, then escapes and kills a dozen good cops to get to the one bad cop who locked him up, then he doesn’t kill the bad cop. Thunder is a fucking jerk. The most remarkable thing about this film, however, is that there are no fewer then four car chase sequences, one of which involves a helicopter. If you fucking love car chases and you need a B-Movie for The French Connection, I guess Thunder Warrior II is the way to go. You know, so long as you don’t care that it’s an awful movie.

Deadly Ransom

Yeah, there are a lot of action movies in this bunch, but I already took all the good ones from this batch for Part 3, pretty much. Don’t worry, I’m saving my good ones for last. Deadly Ransom is about a smarmy motherfucker that I hate who has to stop some bad guy who does cocaine constantly and who kidnapped the president’s daughter (who is also the girlfriend of our main character). I hate movies like this.

Mr. Bill’s Real Life Adventures

Oh no! They made a live-action Mr. Bill! Yeah, you know that little play-doh guy on old Saturday Night Live skits where the entire point was to run him over with cars and tear his head off and stuff? Well, apparently Shelley Duvall thought it would be a good idea to do a live-action TV show of it, and this is the pilot (which strangely never got picked up), along with a “making of” bit which is longer than the actual episode. For some reason, Mr. Bill has a wife and child, and he goes out on a boy scout trip to the woods with his son and his neighbor Mr. Sluggo… and his son, which he has for some reason. There’s a terrible laugh track and everything’s sized down as if they were the same size as the little play-doh Mr. Bill and… WHAT THE FUCK?! The only thing that outdoes the terribleness of this idea is how poorly it’s pulled off. It’s the worst hour ever.

Retroactive

Jesus Fuck Dammit, I hate this movie so goddamn much it makes me want to foam at the mouth and scare children. Retroactive is a time travel movie starring Jim Belushi as a southern redneck homicidal maniac. He (and his girlfriend) gives a lift to some random woman (our main character who is terrible at everything), and after he eventually kills everyone around but her, she manages to find her way to an out-of-the-way bunker where a mad scientist has been creating a time machine which can take you back in time one hour. It basically just rewinds everything, putting you back where you were an hour ago, except you have knowledge of the future. Okay, that’s not the worst time travel ever, I guess. Anyway, our main character tries several times to keep people from dying at the hands of Belushi, but every time she tries, it just turns out worse and worse and worse. Seriously, every single thing this woman tries is idiotic and fails miserably. Finally, at the end of the movie, she decides to just not get picked up by Belushi and… everybody but her dies anyway. HAPPY ENDING, I GUESS!

Voyage of the Rock Aliens

Do you like musicals? How about the 80′s? How about the worst possible music to come out of the 80′s in a musical about aliens that dress like Devo and have a robot that’s a fire hydrant with wheels? That’s right, I didn’t fucking think so. The plot has something to do with some woman who’s in love with the leader of both the aliens and a really retarded “gang”, and they Battle of the Bands to decide who wins her. The worst part about this musical is the music, which may seem obvious, but there’s really so much awful shit in here it’s hard to decide. Lucky for you, I have a video! WATCH IT.

Watch it already!

Ah hahaha, you watched it! IDIOT.

The Wiz Kid

My final movie in this whole stupid series (at least until I go back and get another batch) is the German film The Wiz Kid. There is so much wrong with The Wiz Kid that it’s tough even thinking of a place to start. The concept of the movie is that there’s a nerd who’s not popular (NO!), so he makes a clone of himself which will be more cool, and which hatches out of a giant egg and which needs to be plugged into the wall at night for some reason and apparently has “programming” and which is more like a fucking robot than a clone. The kid wants to get with this girl, so he sends his “cool” clone to school to woo her, and… ugh, look, the plot is really stupid, but it’s nowhere near what makes this movie terrible.

Like this, only moving around and telling bad jokes.

First off, the soo-ooper gen-i-us kid created this robot to help him around his “lab” (room), which he decided to make in the shape of a FUCKING FRIGHTENING MONKEY ROBOT. You know how creepy those little cymbal monkeys can be? Like that, only much bigger and it had a crude, creepy animatronic face. Fuck the fuck out of that robot. I really wish I could show you an actual picture of the thing, but there aren’t any fucking pictures of this stupid movie online anywhere and my copy’s on a VHS tape, so… You’re just going to have to use your imagination, here. Make it as scary as possible, to help prove my point that it doesn’t belong in a kid’s movie. Also that I hate it.

I guess I’ll just cut to the chase and get to the bit that’s really, really fucked up about this movie, and yet, I want to stress this, it’s still not the WORST of The Wiz Kid. As soon as the clone first hatches, it goes downstairs to talk to the kid’s mom (and bartender robot, which thankfully does not have the evil visage of a toy which watches you and plans to kill you), and then it goes on to try and seduce the mom by singing a Huey Lewis and the News song. Keep in mind that the kid is like, ten. He’s dancing around her, playfully touching her sweatshirt… which she playfully takes off… Oh what the fuck, this is so fucked up and wrong. Fuck this Oedipal nightmare, I can’t even talk about this anymore.