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2019 ERNIE LADD MEMORIAL BLACK HISTORY MONTH REVIEWS


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GIMME THE LOOT (Leon, 2012)

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IMDB

ROTTEN TOMATOES (91% C/65% A)

SELECTED BY: @S.K.o.S.

I went through a list that I have of my favorite movies and (other than one other choice that I thought was too obvious) Gimme The Loot was really the only one that fit the bill. It's about two teens in New York City trying to come up with $500 because... something about putting graffiti on the Mets' Home Run Apple?  Anyway, it's very clearly an indie movie, the acting is not the greatest, but it grows on you and hopefully by the end it'll put a smile on your face.

REVIEWED BY: @Execproducer

My review is for Gimme The Loot (2012). A first feature for director Adam Leon (Tramps), it follows two days in the life of Bronx graffiti artists Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sophia (Tashiana Washington). Frustrated by some Queens toys buffing over their tags with the NY Mets colors.... that's tagger jargon for punk ass bitches from Queens painting over their work with Mets colors. I looked it up.....they come up with the idea to 'bomb the apple', meaning perform their artistic endeavors on the NY Mets Home Run Apple. If they succeed, they'll be the Bombers of All Bombers, legends in their world.  All they need is five hundred dollars to pay off a security guard to let them into Citi Field (which they refer to as Shea Stadium because fucka bank!) so they can do their work. But how are these youngsters going to get that paper? That is basically the main concern of this film.  
 
So first they split up, working different hustles to make their score. Malcolm rips off Donnie (Adam Metzger), a drug dealer he sometimes runs for and goes to sell the stolen product to one of Donnie's customers Ginnie ( Zoë Lescaze), a mildly dingy Greenwich Village  white girl that is a friend of Donnie's sister. Sophia sets out to sell some of the paint cans that her and Malcolm stole in the film's opening scene and to collect a commission for a custom t-shirt from Ronaldo (James Harris Jr.). Both have problems along the way. Donnie is hot on Malcolm's trail and for Sophia, every success is immediately followed by a setback. Later they will regroup and team up with Champion (Meeko), a petty thief of their acquaintance, in a bid to rob Ginnie of her jewelry.   
 
If all of that sounds like the makings of an urban crime film with a pumping Hip-Hop soundtrack, well, it's not. Sure, there is plenty of criminality, much of it perpetrated as casually as breathing by our two young protagonists, but it is mostly of the mild variety and there won't be a body count by the end of the film. In fact one suspects in the movie after the movie, when Donnie finally catches up to Malcolm there will be a whole lot of yelling, perhaps some shoving, and maybe even a slap upside the head, but that will be the extent of it. Both Champion and Malcolm prove to be comically inept at B&E and the Ginnie jewel caper fizzles out with a whimper.  And despite the film's title, we get precious little Hip-Hop with the soundtrack favoring Gospel, R&B, and some lite Jazz. Hell, there is barely anything in the way of graffiti culture. Aside from a brief scene of them tagging a building at the beginning of the film and a moment of them sketching designs in a notebook, we see Malcolm using a magic marker to write his tag on a concrete post and Sophia slapping stickers with her tag onto a couple of places and that's about it.  
 
This is really a story about Malcolm and Sophia and their desire to make their way in the world. Malcolm is a sweet goofy kid, a little bit of a mama's boy that just wants respect. Sophia is the harder of the two but she has to be. Her mouth and her attitude are her main weapons and defenses but because she isn't that hard , she is constantly thwarted in her quest to raise the money they need. She is robbed of her bike by two little boys, burned by a fence, and eventually mugged by the same skinny white punks that are defacing their work. Even Malcolm lets slip that he believes he doesn't get respect because he partners with a girl. Still, she has something inside that makes it hard to bet against her. While Malcolm may believe others see it differently, he clearly respects and looks up to her.
 
They have a great friendship with something else bubbling underneath. Both have possible romantic options. Sophia with Kaps (Melvin Magoli), a kid that deals paint cans. Cooler and more mature than Malcolm, he has eyes for her and she is obviously tempted. Malcolm with Ginnie. More worldly than Sophia, she initiates intimacy that is only interrupted by the sudden appearance of Donnie. But we quickly see that these are, in fact, dead ends. Kaps deals to and defends  Sophia's enemies and when a punk named Rico (Joshua Rivera) verbally harasses her,  Kaps does little to stop it. Later, when they encounter Rico again, Malcolm shuts that shit down immediately. When Malcolm returns to Ginnie's apartment to sell her more weed, he encounters a group of her friends and her demeanor towards him is decidedly different. That is when the idea of robbing her jewelry goes from a scenario where Sophia swipes them while Malcolm and Ginnie have sex to a plan where Malcolm and Champion break-in.Though it hasn't happened by the end of the film, it seems obvious that Malcolm and Sophia are meant to be together. You can tell by the way he gazes at her when she isn't looking and by how annoyed she gets when he talks about Ginnie.  
 
For a first feature, shot on a shoestring budget with a cast of unknown and non-actors and apparently  without film permits, it is remarkably assured work. Lots of long shots out in the streets presumably to avoid detection and mostly hand-held camera work, yet still doesn't feel indie-riffic. Knowing absolutely nothing about NYC, it still feels 'authentic'. We get a lot of the touchstones of urban films: rooftops, bodegas, house parties, playground basketball, subways, etc.   I even bit on realness of the 90's era archival public access TV footage until a little searching turned up the 20-year-old  actress that played the hostess of All City Hour and some dude named Dane Martinez. I enjoyed all of the performances and if there is any justice, both Ty Hickson and Tashiana Washington will have very successful careers.

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KEVIN HART’S GUIDE TO BLACK HISTORY (Stern 2019)

IMDB

(BONUS REVIEW BY: RIPPA)

I wonder how many of you know this exists because up until this past weekend – I didn’t. I think I happen to be scrolling through Netflix looking for something to watch on the day it dropped. I started watching it because if nothing else I figured I could get a bonus review out of it. I ended up pleasantly surprised but I did have some… things… that didn’t sit right with me.

The concept is basically a hour long show where Kevin Hart teaches his “daughter” (played by Saniyya Sidney who is currently on The Passage) about “lesser” known black historical figures – lesser was my choice of words but I could have basically said “any important black figure who isn’t Harriet Tubman or George Washington Carver”.

Designed for a younger audience but mature enough to be appreciated by all. (If you have younger age kids, you are probably familiar with this concept on other kid shows.) And considering the folks talked about almost no white person will know anything about because they never got featured on a CBS “here is 30 seconds again on Martin Luther King so we can fill our quota of saying we honored Black History Month” moment (think also the WWE with Ernie Ladd) – it really should be watched for all. At least you will learn more names that you can do your own research.

A mixture of sketches and wackadoo graphics – it comes across almost as if it is 45 Youtube videos smashed into a one hour TV show. This gives the presentation somewhat of a shotgun feel as they are trying to cover as much variety of black history as possible. This really should have been multiple like 20 minutes episodes and then you could have gone into more depth into each area but that might be me being selfish because I wanted more.

Famous faces show up from time to time. Like Tiffany Hadish plays Mae Jamison (the first black female astronaut) which had me slapping my knee. Lil Rel shows up early on as Henry “Box” Brown and then again about three quarters of the way through so they can suddenly talk about black sports figures – that was an awkward transition. Actually – I can’t complain there because all I kept thinking about was that one time Bryan Alvarez didn’t know who Jesse Owens was and how no one learned about him in school.

Oh and Josephine Baker made me feel tingly in my loins… again.

There is also a cameo near the end that popped me big time.

My two biggest “issues” I would say are:
1)    They brought up Hitler a lot and boy did they bend over backwards to not say “killing Jews”. It was really noticeable. Plus – they had a Hitler in what was the least funny skit being all “Oh this is my crazy uncle who just happens to also be a fascist” way and it was bordering on uncomfortable. Part of me is guessing that they avoiding getting too deep to keep it at TV-PG rating and it’s impossible to discuss pretty much any notable black figure for like a 20 year period without talking about Hitler. Still….

2)    I don’t know if Kevin Hart really should have been the one leading the charge on this one. And this isn’t me being all “HE IS THE DEVIL! I AM GLAD THE OSCARS BOOTED HIM!” since this was clearly done before that happened. It’s not like Netflix is gonna be all “Kevin – you know when February is, please hide under a rock till then”. It is more that, while I have no problems with Hart I just feel there could have been someone better for the show. The problem is I can’t think of who. Just this weird lingering feeling. It needed that comedic touch but would have also definitely being worse if like Chris Rock was doing it. Maybe Keegan-Michael Key???

Anyway – it is barely an hour of your time and it gets my recommendation. If nothing else – jot down the names yourself and get yourself a big brain like Brad.
 

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FRIDAY (Gray, 1995)

friday-movie-poster-1995-1020196025.jpg

IMDB

ROTTEN TOMATOES (76% C/91% A)

SELECTED BY: RIPPA

I admit to using my ability to see the other movies that were being selected to guide my hand as I wanted to fill one of the gaps that weren't being selected by everyone else. My original plan was to select a biopic - even more specifically a musical biopic. The rub was finding ones that were easily available for folks to watch. I really really really wanted to select What's Love Got To Do With It but the only version I could find was dubbed in like Portuguese. There is no Lady Sings the Blues around either. In a panic because I needed to settle on a pick - I saw Friday was on Netflix and we were lacking in comedies. We were also lacking in big obvious picks (though there is more to come there.)

REVIEWED BY: @J.H.

I might be in the minority when it comes to Friday as I think it is just an “OK” movie. I have nothing against it. It is well directed, well-acted and has a pretty decent story but it never really made me want to go out and see it in the theater, rent it on video or catch it on a pay channel on Cable. I watched it for the first time in 1998, 3 years after it was released in theaters, and that was after a long night working the line at the restaurant, I was employed at on a Saturday night. I was just too lazy to get up to change the channel. I basically watched it out of fatigue.

So, what is it about Friday that makes it have such a hardcore fanbase? Why exactly is it so loved?

There were so many other movies for this project I would’ve chosen to review before Friday simply because there are other films I enjoy more (and no, I am not going to list them, that would be rude and disrespectful to everyone else involved in the project).

So why doesn’t this movie connect with me the way it does with almost everyone else I know?

Is it because I’m a nerdy white guy? O, I tend to not base whether I like a film based my own race. I mean enjoyed Ice Cube’s Barbershop a great deal and we won’t deep dive into my love of African American cinema and early 80s Hip Hop

It isn’t that the movie isn’t funny, it has more than a few moments that made me chortle. It has well developed protagonists and antagonists. Hell, Tiny Lister Jr as Deebo is one of the best menacing, unlikable villains in a movie you can come across. I mean, there is nothing to like about him, he’s a bully not just to Ice Cube’s Craig but to pretty much every character he meets when he is onscreen.

Maybe it’s just a case of, there is nothing in Friday that I haven’t seen before. Maybe it is the fact that I’m so thoroughly a kid from the East Coast that I can’t wrap my brain of working middle class kin California. I keep trying to think of answers for why this movie doesn’t connect with me. I mentally wrestle thinking that maybe there is something legitimately wrong with me.

The movie has an underdog protagonist in Craig played by Ice Cube. To say Craig’s luck is bad is just poor word choice. There are so many modifiers you can use describe how bad Craig’s luck is, especially on the Friday in question. Her loses his job after being framed for stealing boxes. Insult to injury, he gets fired on his day off. He already lives at home with parents and sister but now he’s unemployed. It doesn’t help that his best friend Smokey (Chris Tucker) does nothing to really encourage him to take any steps to become employed again, but Smokey is a drug dealer, so it isn’t like he’s motivating Craig toward anything legitimate. Hell, Smokey is pretty much responsible for Craig’s day getting worse. Most everything that happens to Craig is based off him taking advice from Smokey.  Smokey is the worst best friend you can have, and we’ve all had friends like that.

Smokey is even worse since he’s partaking of his consignment of weed from his local supplier Big Worm (Faizon Love). So, when Worm comes looking for his money and Smokey doesn’t have it naturally Worm threatens to kill not only Smokey but Craig as well for merely associating with him. Craig is loyal to Smokey but damn is that loyalty misplaced.

Children and adults alike are afraid of Deebo. Tiny Lister is great as Deebo, menacing as hell and believable as a bully that no one wants to fuck with. He steals Red’s (DJ Pooh) simply because he is Deebo and he can. The thing is, the most terrifying moment in the movie isn’t directly linked to /Deebo, its more about the implied threat of a drive-by shooting. It feels very real and that probably has a lot to do with Ice Cube having grown-up in South Central LA where events like that happened in the 80s and 90s more than most people were willing to admit, and Cube and others have rapped about in their music. Deebo is scary but random violence where you can be the victim is bone chilling in its sense of dread.

Craig and Smokey might be the main characters, but the real soul of the movie is John Witherspoon as Craig’s Father, Willie. When Witherspoon gives Craig a talking to about family and what it means to be a man, well damn that is a great stirring performance. If Smokey is the catalyst for Craig to be a fuck-up, then Willie Jones is whaterspoon herspoonh you want a Father to be. Stern yet caring and man who has a strong sense of right and wrong. Willie Jones wants Craig not to be the man that Willie is but something better. Willie is comic relief for Craig’s homelife but at that moment, with a Father telling his son what it means to be a man is John Witherspoon showing you that his drama is just as strong as comedy.

Do we have to really cover the rest of the movie? Is it necessary? It’s a feel-good movie after all so it isn’t like Craig confronts Deebo and gets killed. I mean there is a fight and it is a brutal bloody fight but Craig, as the protagonist must win simply to prove that on that absolutely shitty day, something good can happen for the good guy.

OK so maybe I like Friday more than I let on. It is full of great colorful characters (hell I didn’t even cover the late great Bernie Mac’s as Pastor Clever), some fun comedy and a pretty great moment with John Witherspoon. In the end it is a fun movie about working class people dealing with the craziness of the people who live around them and how even on a shitty Friday, something good can come of it all.

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42 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

I admit to using my ability to see the other movies that were being selected to guide my hand as I wanted to fill one of the gaps that weren't being selected by everyone else. My original plan was to select a biopic - even more specifically a musical biopic. The rub was finding ones that were easily available for folks to watch. I really really really wanted to select What's Love Got To Do With It but the only version I could find was dubbed in like Portuguese. There is no Lady Sings the Blues around either. In a panic because I needed to settle on a pick - I saw Friday was on Netflix and we were lacking in comedies. We were also lacking in big obvious picks (though there is more to come there.)

I can't watch anything like What's Love Got To Do With it or Mahagony without getting angry for days.

I also cannot watch Bessie more than a couple times a year because I'm not good with the lingering image of a nude Queen Latifa being burned into my retina for days at a time.

If you'd made me watch one of those movies, I probably would've rugby kicked you right in the groin.

Friday is awesome, but where is the bonus review of Next Friday?.  

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3 hours ago, RIPPA said:

If Smokey is the catalyst for Craig to be a fuck-up, then Willie Jones is whaterspoon herspoonh you want a Father to be. 

Was someone using their phone here?  Or voice to text?  

I also grew up with Friday as one of Those Movies.  I also don't really care for it for basically all the reasons JH mentioned (and then kind of reneged on).

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24 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Are your fingers broke?

I already gave you a bonus review.  

But yeah, that had some ranting so if I can shoehorn some time during the week I will try to put together a Next Friday review.

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4 hours ago, Contentious C said:

Was someone using their phone here?  Or voice to text?  

I also grew up with Friday as one of Those Movies.  I also don't really care for it for basically all the reasons JH mentioned (and then kind of reneged on).

What kills me is thst my spell check totally missed this

James

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I have two official reviews left and one bonus review from someone to post.

I am purposely waiting to post the last official review till next week to wrap things up for reasons that will be explained.

I have a few bonus reviews that I want to write and I will gladly take ones from anyone else. Work under the assumption you have through the weekend to do so.

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HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE (Townsend, 1987)

MPW-36586

 

IMDB

ROTTEN TOMATOES (88% C/80% A)

 

SELECTED BY: @Cliff Hanger

"It's a little messy but probably the first movie I saw that really messed with my lily-white perspective and took me outside of my comfort zone"

REVIEWED BY: @J.T.

Directed by Robert Townsend

Cast:  Robert Townsend; Anne-Marie Johnson; Starletta Duupois, et. al.

In the advent of movies like Black Panther and Get Out, it is refreshing and somewhat depressing to look back on the comedic brilliance of a movie like Hollywood Shuffle, note how far minorities have come in seeing themselves properly represented in film, and see how much further they have to travel.

Hollywood Shuffle tells the Show The Truth & Shame The Devil story of Bobby Taylor (Robert Townsend), an aspiring actor dreaming of stardom and working at a fast food joint (Winky-Dinky-Dog!) in order to make ends meet. 

It is sobering to see young Bobby suffer insult after demeaning insult as a myopic Hollywood continues to attempt to place him in a stereotypical box.  Hollywood is a landscape where a light skinned Black actor cannot portray a slave while a dark skinned one cannot be a pimp.  The tragedy being that this is a satire rooted in tragic realities.

As hilarious as these capsulized parodies which provided the blueprint for the television show, In Living Color, are (Death of a Breakdancer is my favorite), this is a story rooted in real pain; both professional and persona.

Just as Malcolm X stated that some of us (black people) may need to be put up against the firing squad wall when the revolution comes, Townsend is equally as caustic to those African-Americans that actively pursue demeaning roles as he is on the studios that offer them.  

But can you really be that harsh on those performers when those are the only sorts of roles being offered?  A film like this probably wouldn't have been made now that the numbers of outlets for African-American acting talent are numerous.

Or are they?  Until Jordan Peele came around, you didn't really see too many Black produced or Black directed horror films with predominantly Black casts and Ryan Coogler may have paved the way for more African-American actors to showcase their skills in pure action films.  

Hollywood Shuffle is not a film without its flaws as the storytelling can be a bit ham fisted, but I think it is still a very important movie.  Robert Townsend must've felt the same way, otherwise he wouldn't have raise $100K on his own to finance the film, nor would he have manufactured the film reels he used to shoot the movie from used edit shots from some Cutting Room floor.

I have watched this movie more times than I can count and the one step forward / two steps back that is the march for artistic equality still drudges on.  I look forward to the day that there is no #oscarssowhite in opposition to a Spike Lee nomination for Best Director or seeing The Hate U Give completely snubbed by the Academy in opposition to the genre breaking films coming out of Monkey Paw Studios.

Make Hollywood Great Again... By Any Means Necessary.

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6 minutes ago, J.T. said:

I just noticed that I totally forwarded my second to last draft to Rippa instead of the finished one.  The spelling and grammar are horrible in that unfinished copy.

And that's AFTER I did a quick edit of it

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TALES FROM THE HOOD (Cundieff, 1995)

Tales+from+the+Hood.jpg

IMDB

ROTTEN TOMATOES (47% C/67% A)

 

BONUS REVIEW BY: @Curt McGirt

I said I wasn't going to let it go unreviewed and I don't want to pick another horror film for next year, so here we go...

I grew up on EC Comics. Gladstone and later Russ Cochran under another guise that slips my mind was reprinting all of the '50s classics in the early '90s just as I hit the perfect, highly impressionable age to pick them up. They were gory, they were black humored, they had an incredibly strong moral backbone, and they were lurid as all get out. It was easy to see why they were so threatening to the Eisenhower-era Americans reproducing in the suburbs, they were a dose of real life, real world truth covered in a goopy glitz of violent fantasy. If Superman was dangerous enough to the despicable charlatan psychologist Frederick Wertham, who infamously derailed the whole comic industry with his book Seduction of the Innocent, then EC was like crack in comparison to ginger beer. Of course, this was the '90s, my parents didn't give a shit, and I ate up every issue of Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and Shock Suspenstories I could get my hands on (the crime and war comics too, but to a lesser extent). We didn't get HBO but when Fox aired the episodes of Tales from the Crypt I ate them us as readily. So when Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott wrote and filmed an "urban" version of EC under the title Tales from the Hood, I was THERE. Dad did the usual: pay for the ticket and popcorn, unleash me in the theater, go down the bar for an hour and a half. 

What I saw was one hell of a movie. My childhood was extremely white growing up -- there was one other black kid at school (also named Curtis) and that was it. But just as I grew up watching Tales reruns on Fox I also watched In Living Color religiously, so I had a sense of what the filmmakers were going for, even if I wasn't familiar with the problems of the inner city or another race than mine. This film sure did underline them. 

They shot high in choosing four stories including wraparound to get through for this anthology. Usually the better ones stick to three stories at most, but four? A daunting task. The wraparound involves three gangbangers going to a local funeral home attended to by an over the top Clarence Williams III to try and retrieve a load of drugs hidden in a casket. Williams, the mortician, proceeds to open individual caskets with their respective deceased within and describe their stories and how they happened to get there. All are morality tales in the EC tradition, only with an African American cast and twist to them. We have a community organizer who runs afoul of killer cops, a young kid tormented by a supposedly invisible monster, a David Duke-type racist politician who moves into a haunted plantation house, and a young gangbanger who gets caught and put into a program that will supposedly reform him of his violent ways. Each story also hits the classic EC notes as far as its horrors go as we have a vengeful zombie, killer dolls, a very EC trope of the abused child with unknown powers, and... well, I don't want to spoil the last story. 

This is powerful and heady stuff. All the performances are very strong. Wings Hauser and Corbin Bernsen are perfect as bigots who you just itch to see get their comeuppance. Lamont Bentley and Rosalind Cash invest the final tale with brutal poignance. Rusty Cundieff himself is excellent as the teacher of the young boy trying to save him from whatever is terrorizing him at home. But the star turn here is an absolutely terrifying performance by David Alan Grier (from In Living Color, of course) as the father of the young boy. On TV, he was and is one of the funniest comedians ever. In this, he embodies ice-cold hostility and ruthless violence. Seeing Corbin Bernsen imitating David Duke is almost a sigh of relief to have as a villain after him. Of course, all of these topics -- black on black crime, domestic violence, racism, killer cops -- are all grist for the mill of today's headlines now more than even in '95. This is far from dated. And though Williams' Crypt Keeper-esque mortician is a source of comic relief, it isn't much. The last segment alone is like a blackjack to the back of your head, and the final reveal in the wraparound after is fitting. 

I think I left the theater with a better understanding of how completely fucked everything is after watching it, and I'm glad my dad let me see it. As a horror anthology there are few that compare or are better (Dead of Night and Creepshow come to mind, plus the Amicus Tales from the Crypt of course). It stands up on rewatch to this day. If you haven't, or if you want to rewatch, It's on Vimeo for free or Youtube etc. for pay, or Shudder if you have that. Give it a watch, it comes with highest recommendations here. 

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Ah, yes.  THE SHIT~!

I am so happy that the black horror film is no longer an anomaly. 

Now I need Jordan Peele to do a Blaxploitation-less version of Blacula that is not named Blacula and give Prince Mamuwalde the vampire movie he deserves.

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5 minutes ago, Curt McGirt said:

Here's the Vimeo stream

Must add that after writing that I got ahold of the soundtrack (which apparently hit #1 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip Hop chart!) and it's a killer, full of really dark cuts from Wu Tang, Scarface, ODB, Gravediggaz, an absolute chiller from Spice 1, etc.

The soundtrack for this movie pretty much put the Horrorcore hip-hop scene on the map even though it had been around for years.

I think I may pick Def By Temptation next year.

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20 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

For some reason I never rented Def By Temptation even though it was a Troma joint. Really need to watch that...

Yes, you really did..

I have it on VHS and had no idea it was on YouTube.

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