The CMP 5 show is coming in a mere two weeks (and one day).

Saturday, April 27. 7:00 PM Eastern.

It will be live in 1800 Chem on the UMich campus. It will also be streamed via Zoom (link to come).

There will be snacks in 1800 Chem. If you’re watching remotely, you are on your own for snacks.

Talk amongst yourselves. About snacks? That’s your decision, isn’t it?

When I see a damaged moon in the sky, I think of two things. One is the broken moon of Thundarr, the Barbarian. The other is Chairface Chippendale from The Tick. There were several moments during Impact when Amy or I leaned over to the other and said simply, CHA.

This movie could have been a tight 78-minute thriller, but instead was a 180-minute bloatfest. I know that it was originally made as a TV miniseries and repackaged into a movie, but that’s no excuse. It races through the plot points and then lingers, ghoulishly, on every possible emotional note. It takes longer, in screen time, for grandpa to have a heart attack and die, grandkids crying beside him, antagonistic stranger watching and feeling awkward, than the entire climactic action sequence on the moon that determines whether humanity lives or dies.

There is also a lot of gendered nonsense. The young boy can identify craters on the moon, and the young girl wants to see “the man in the moon” through the telescope. Dr Maddie Rhodes (Natasha Henstridge, doing her best with the material she’s given) is purportedly a subject-matter-expert and the head of the special team put together by the President. But in practice, all the men on her team lecture her about what science is — and come up with the actual ideas and do the planning. “Let’s get some men in here to do the real science,” is somehow not an actual line of dialogue. This movie feels like it was an audition script for a writer who desperately wanted to write Hallmark movies. And I mean that in the most by-the-numbers way possible.

The movie starts with all thirty-seven main characters watching a meteor shower. This is an exaggeration, but only barely. Oh no! Behind the meteors was an asteroid, lurking undetected. It crashes into the moon and sends flaming moon bits to sprinkle destruction across the planet. The moon stabilizes in a new orbit. Mass panic is averted. Thank goodness it’s over.

It’s not over! There are weird static electricity surges. A meteorite hunter (and we learn later, the Globally Recognized Subject-Matter-Expert on The Moon) finds a piece of the object that hit the moon. It’s heavy. It’s magnetic. The moon moves again, but has stabilized in its newer, more eccentric, orbit. Mass panic is averted. Thank goodness it’s over.

It’s not over! It turns out the object that crashed into the moon — and apparently lodged there — was a fragment of a brown dwarf star with a mass twice that of earth. More electrical mayhem occurs as well as some brief moments of reduced gravity when the moon is at perigee. Note that none of the actual scientists ever use this word, which means “the point where a satellite is closest to the earth.” Mass panic is averted. Thank goodness it’s over.

It’s not over! The moon moves yet again, stabilizing into a newer, sexier orbit. Although “stabilize” turns out to be the incorrect verb once the team analyzes the data. In fact, the moon is now going to crash into the earth in 40 days (although one could pedantically note that as the less massive object, it’s really the earth crashing into the moon – but no one ever does).

Many gravitational shenanigans occur, putting side characters into danger. Meteorite Hunter’s pregnant fiancée is on a train that goes parabolically into the sky. Primary Male Scientist’s kids and father-in-law try to drive to DC and their car also goes into the air.

These alternate with non-gravitational shenanigans, such as Dr Maddie Rhodes’ sleazy journalist ex-husband showing up in the movie just long enough to leak the whole “moon crashing into the earth” bit to the news. Mass panic is not so much averted.

The heroes present the President with their plan, but the military has an alternate plan. The President goes with the military’s plan (the classic “NUKE THE MOON”). It doesn’t work. Now the dramatic tension is heightened, since the timeline is constricted, and our heroes must come up with a new plan, as there is no longer time to implement their original plan.

The new plan involves an experimental anti-gravity machine and a missile fired down into the crevasses of the moon. The intent is the controlled yeeting of the brown dwarf fragment into a different solar orbit than ours. Although my explanation here is more technical and scientifically accurate than anything anyone says in this movie.

All the while, they’re yanking at the heart strings with moments of (to quote Amy) “cloying forced sentimentality,” and enabling us to test our eye rolling muscles … and our gag reflexes.

In fact, there were so many moments that made us want to gag — given that the movie begins with pieces of the moon crashing down to earth — we started calling it Seven Heaves.

…but to be honest, there were way more than seven heave-worthy moments.

Witchcraft 5: Dance with the Devil involves a lot of hypnosis, a decent amount of homicide, and a moderate amount of nudity — but very little of what I would consider “Witchcraft.”

It starts with Marta (a prostitute), taking a businessman to her room. Only it turns out Marta isn’t a prostitute, it’s a scam she and her boyfriend, Bill, are running. Bill hits the businessman too hard, and he dies, so they have to hide the body.

A preacher and his secretary are being driven to a meeting. The preacher is very much the embodiment of goodness (for B-movie values of “embodiment of goodness”).

With the body in the trunk, Marta and Bill are driving out of town when a drunk lurches in front of their car. They sideswipe the drunk, and drive off. The preacher and his secretary see this happen. They get out of the car to see if they can help the dying fellow.

The dying fellow seems to house a malevolent spirit, which takes over the preacher’s body. Whoops.

Marta and Bill are driving through the forest when their car breaks down. They get out on foot to go for help, body in the trunk conveniently forgotten. No one actually says “What else could possibly go wrong?,” but there is a clear sense that things haven’t been going well.

They come across an old man sitting alone at a campfire. He implies that he summoned the two. Marta distracts the old man with seduction while Bill hits him over the head. But not hard enough to kill him this time, Bill.

While exploring the old man’s hovel for stuff to steal, Marta and Bill discover that he is not what he appeared. He isn’t dead. He isn’t unconscious. He has the not-at-all-ominous name of Cain. Cain is an agent of Satan, on earth to collect souls. He uses his fantastic Satanic hypnotist-adjacent powers to make Marta kill Bill, then demands that she serve him as acolyte. However, if she does a good job, he’ll make sure she gets her proper reward when Satan returns to earth. I’m not at all certain if this was meant to be a threat, or an honest enticement. The movie doesn’t give hints either way.

The next morning, elsewhere, Keli and William (two completely new characters) wake up. Keli has the TV on. That preacher from five minutes ago in the movie (“embodiment of goodness” possessed by a malevolent spirit) is a televangelist. She refers to him as her pastor, says he sounds so different recently, and turns off the TV.

Keli has to fly to San Francisco for a meeting, but reminds William that he’s promised to take her out dancing that night. William is grumpy about it, but agrees.

There is no dancing that night. A new magician is appearing at the club. It’s Cain! And Marta as his assistant. Cain selects William to be hypnotized, and Keli convinces him to go up. Cain has sensed the power within William. William is apparently a Warlock. Cain easily hypnotizes William. This won’t cause problems later at all.

Cain collects a whole mess of souls at the dance club after the show. But he still has several recalcitrant ones he needs to collect from prior contracts. What a bother. But wait … if Marta uses her sexuality to seduce William, then William will be forced to do his bidding!

A poorly-directed and surprisingly perspiration-filled sex scene ensues between Marta and the hypnotized William, all the while Keli is asleep next to William.

William kills a dude and returns the dude’s soul to Cain. Was this the same night that Marta and William…? It’s unclear.

The next morning, William wakes up freaked out and with blood on his hands. When Keli attempts to comfort him, he has a spasm of rage and hits her. This is unacceptable! But since the movie was made in 1993, Keli takes the extreme step of … calling her pastor in for counseling.

After some more miscellaneous soul harvesting while William is asleep/hypnotized, the pastor shows up with Anastasia, a random white witch. And yes, I mean “white witch” in all the relevant meanings of the phrase.

The pastor offers to help, but when he hears Cain’s name, he nopes out of the house. But bravely leaves Anastasia to do the curse research, set up candles for the protective circle, and so on.

At night, Marta shows up, kills Anastasia, and has sex with William again. This time instead of excessive sweat, Marta uses wax from the candles in the (not-so-)protective circle.

William kills another guy. As post-coital habits go, that one is unsustainable.

The next morning, William feels great. Keli agrees that he can leave the protective circle to shower. Said shower being in the middle of some sort of rock cavern with running water … Keli’s house is too much. Oh no, an abundance of water, what could that signal? William and Keli have sex in the shower, and again William has a spasm of violence, throwing Keli to the ground. He and Keli agree that he must go back into the protective circle, and stay there.

Keli goes to hunt down the pastor directly. No longer the “embodiment of goodness,” he has finally seduced his secretary, and is in the middle of having (for once, unnecessary-fluid-free) sex with her.

The pastor tells Keli that Cain is almost impossible to kill, except for the sword Cain carries. But it’s always on his person. How can she get it away from him to stab him with it? She doesn’t care, she has to help William!

Keli tries to sneak into Cain’s demesne and is captured. William shows up to rescue her. Cain loans Marta his sword to kill Keli. With Keli threatened, William is able to shake off the hypnotic control. Cain tells Marta to kill William. She fails. William is able to get the sword, and kills Cain.

Goodness has triumphed, the end. Goodness, he’s triumphed. The end?

There’s a lot to unpack here. I’m not sure what it says that Keli being threatened with a sword was able to snap William out of Cain’s hypnotic control, and William hitting her directly with his fists was not.

The three women who have sex scenes (Marta, Keli, the church secretary (who is credited as Secretary)) are all of a certain physical type. If you blurred out their faces, I couldn’t tell them apart. Anastasia was a somewhat different body type, and she didn’t take her shirt off on camera.

Don’t worry too much about any questionable dialogue, though. The odds are that you won’t be able to hear it. The volume of this movie was low, all around. I had all the relevant meters cranked up to maximum, and I still spent half the movie hunched over my laptop, trying to decipher dialogue. I put a lot more effort into hearing the movie’s dialogue than the writers put into writing it.

The most famous person adjacent to this movie is Thomas Jane, the ex-husband of the actress who played Anastasia.

The most famous person in this movie? That’s a trick question.

Sometimes rhetorical questions are better off remaining rhetorical. For example: how many offensive caricatures can you fit into one dinosaur movie?

Hold Dinosaurus!‘ beer (I think I punctuated that right) and watch this. It has Mexican day-laborers, O’Leary the drunken Irishman, a sinister vaguely-Latin-American villain, his “little tamale” (a Central-American woman who knows how to make molotov cocktails), lazy black folks … and I’m not even counting the Comic Relief Neanderthal, or Dumpy the friendly bulldozer driver.

Shot in St Croix, Virgin Islands, it’s the story of two well-preserved undersea dinosaur remains that are dragged up onshore for exhibition. But they turn out to have been only hibernating, and a tropical rainstorm thaws them out and sends the movie on its way. The Neanderthal? Was sort of along for the ride.

The T-rex eats people and things. But mostly people. It fights the friendly Brontosaurus. A little boy is sad. The Neanderthal has comic escapades around the island. The villain kidnaps our heroine, but she is rescued by the Neanderthal. Our hero fights the T-Rex with a construction crane.

One of the random background extras looks a lot like James Baskett (Uncle Remus from Song of the South), so my notes say things like “more racist stereotypes, with cameo by Uncle Remus” and “Uncle Remus clapping unenthusiastically.”

In the end, the white people triumph with good ol’ white people ingenuity.

Offensive Shaolin Longfist was an incoherent movie, and I don’t have much coherent to say about it. Many of the character names aren’t mentioned aloud in the English dub, so for most of the movie, Pang was the only name we knew. There are gratuitous shaolin backflips and random bird noises. There is chess-style kung fu, and inappropriate wocka-chicka funky porn music. Maybe it made sense in the original Korean.