Donna Mills - The Eyes Have It (1986)

GURL, please. Put down the blue eye shadow and step away from the sparkly pink lip gloss. You are forty-six years old! Donna Mills proudly boasts that she does her own make-up. This video exists so she can demonstrate for we women of lesser competence, how to properly cake ourselves in layers of pasty opaque sludge. Cucumber slices on the eyes? Try an entire cucumber ON YOUR FACE. No really...

She repeatedly refers to her cosmetic style as "natural", while constantly looking like she's posing for a boudoir photo at Sears Portrait Studio. Fully airbrushed, contouring meant to cover a beard, hair teased to the heavens, Dairy Queen Glamour Shot Valentine's Day 2 for 1 special.

Then we get to see her do a little fashion show, take a bath and demonstrate the exact same make-up tips in different lighting and with colored contact lens'. C'mon Donna, you're reaching. She even shows us how to wash our own face, because we've come this far without having these skills.

I'm a fresh faced gal, do you want to know the real secret to looking young(er)? Try NOT spackling your face with nasty drywall clown paint. Eyes and lips? sure. A little concealer or powder on occasion, of course. But the Foundation/concealer/powder/blush quadroplaster? OY! She literally instructs people to PRESS POWDER FIRMLY INTO THEIR SKIN SO IT WON'T COME OFF. Just rub it in, fill those pores. It's fine, you can remove it with your phallic vegetable astringent.

In all sincerity, I fucking LIIIIIIVE FOR THIS SHIT. It's the kind of thing Shana Moulton is parodying in 'Whispering Pines', or material you'd find on 'Womans-Day', the greatest tumblr of all time. Donna Mills is selling a product you can't buy at the store. Something unattainable and phony. She's selling a false sense of self-worth. And yet, I could watch this aging soap actresses do her make-up and have fashion shows in her living room all day. This is a historical relic because, simply put, they don't make 'em like this anymore! Make-up tutorials are one thing, but we're not buying the instructions, we're buying Donna and basking in her frivolous bullshit lifestyle. If I didn't love it so much it would make me SICK. And for the record, I've been dying to play with my make-up ever since I watched this. I'm not immune!

So what have we learned today?

• How to feather brown eyeliner 40 different ways (spoiler: they're all the same)
• How to wash our face
• How to NOT dry our face (pat, do not rub) 
• The Mills' household has no shortage of over-sized cucumbers in the fridge.
• Donna suspiciously doesn't seem to own any cats.
• Frosted lip gloss is a friend to NO ONE.
• Donna has a seemingly endless cache of lighted mirrors, and assumes that we all do too.
• To be attractive you must be rich, coagulating in rouge, blonde and being white doesn't hurt.(Subtext, Donna. Not buying your "brown eye" tutorial for a second)
• Donna is an asshole, one can only assume.
• ABC Movies' of the Week clearly do not pay enough for Donna to hire someone to do her make-up PROFESSIONALLY.

The nefarious pink lip gloss, in action.

Don't forget to admire yourself for hours after, days even.

Shortly after my pal Warren bestowed this priceless treasure upon me, I found myself in this weird shop on Hollywood Blvd that sells nothing but old porno mags and shell art. A harmonious marriage of objects. Given that I'm both a collector of kitschy shell crap and any ephemera of interest, I had a good time digging around. I made an amazing discovery; a publication I was not previously aware of: "Valley Magazine" - a fashion mag for women who live in the Valley. That's the stuff dreams are made of. And who do you think graces the cover of this coveted holy book?

Miss Donna Mills, THE SAME YEAR AS 'THE EYES HAVE IT'! It was a busy year for our amateur cosmetologist. And now that you mention it, she so totally would live in the Valley. It's just glaringly obvious to me now.

I might add that this issue includes a Christmas shopping guide for the Sherman Oaks Galleria, aka: the Mall you've seen in EVERY movie from the 80's and 90's. Envy me, for I hold in my hands the mystic scroll...

As if your day couldn't get any better, here are some choice threads from the Winter of '86.

Nice Cats (1995)

Lately I've been delving into the fascinating and awful world of Mockbuster animation. Extremely low budget rip-offs of Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks films. When it comes to trash cinema, something about this stuff seems sleazier than exploitation. Taking advantage of the ignorance of kids and the ambivalence of parents. The first example I decided to explore is this extremely crude mock-up of The Aristocats awkwardly titled "Nice Cats" ('Artige Katzen' in German).

Mrs. Mcdonald is taking her three cats on vacation to Acapulco. Lauren, the mother cat and her two kittens Lucy and Lionel. It's worth noting that it's they live in San Francisco, I did the math and it's 2,400 miles. That's quite the road trip. By the end of a generic incidental casio jingle, they're in Acapulco and immediately Lucy is getting the itch to wander. Mrs. Mcdonald warns all the cats that there's talk of a cat catcher on the prowl so to stay near the estate. Lucy runs off anyway and gets herself catnapped.

"Bunny Fashion"

"I Love Cats"

In cat jail she meets a stray named Charlie, they work together to plan an escape. Lucy plays dead to distract the cat catcher long enough to bite his bunghole.

By the time they get back to the estate Mrs. Mcdonald has taken the two cats and gone back to San Francisco, an ass move if I ever saw one. So now they have to travel all 2,400 miles on foot, Encountering different animals and humans along the way who help.

The plot is inconsequential. From the onset of the first frame you know that you're in for something truly horrific. One of the strangest companies to piggy back the success of Disney, the German based "Dingo Pictures" is responsible for other atrocities such as 'The Dalmations'  (101 Dalmations), 'Toys' (Toy Story), 'Countryside Bears' (Winnie the Pooh), and the one I'm the most excited to see 'Dinosaur Adventure' (The Land Before Time). Run by a husband and wife team, Ludwig Ickert and Simone Greiss, and I suspect not a single other employee. The backgrounds look like they were hand drawn by elementary schoolers and the characters themselves appear to have been TRACED from the source material. All three cats from "Nice Cats" have the same outline as Duchess from The Aristocats. The animation style reminds me of something between outdated 70's x-rated cartoons and that creepypasta 'Suicide Mouse'. From the limited images I've seen, it appears that all of their films have the same unfinished dullness. If the animation and copyright infringement wasn't enough, the dialog is amateurishly storybook style; with a woman narrating for every character. She has no accent but the grammar and sentax tells me that this was poorly translated from another language. With sentences like "Breathing was difficult for many people because the air was stuffy" - in regards to living in the city, or when the catcher caught a cat saying "That was a successful cat!". My favorite line however is when Lucy announces "I can't find my damn hairbrush!" - apparently Dingo is notorious for sprinkling curse words into their films.

A few other things I appreciated about 'Nice Cats'...

the entire movie is poorly hand drawn up until the end when they board an 8 bit boat. Suddenly we're in a video game.

The placement of the characters over the background went beyond not giving a shit. Charlie is floating in the middle of the frame like some experimental Jean-Christophe Averty shit.

Cameo by fake Thumper.

The saddest pizza I've ever seen. This isn't even Crayola, this is Roseart half way through the school year.

This racially confused Italian restaurant with a pizza being flipped like a pancake and a miniature china-man wearing a coolie and holding two sticks in front of a closed pot. This may be one of the most confusing moments in film history. I am literally stunned.


With my own "nice cat" Egbert recovering from oral surgery, this seemed like as good a time as any to participate in this bewilderment. Egbert has the luxury of pain killers why I painfully endured in sobriety. 'Nice Cats' and "Dingo Pictures" in general  is a personal journey you must decided if you want to take. God help you if you're as masochistic as me.

Holiday Horrible-thon Part 1: All Dogs Go To Christmas

Holy crap, where to begin. In past holiday marathons I usually curate a few handfuls of killer Santa movies, with some cheesy made for tv specials and with any luck, some K. Gordon Murray magic. As you may recall, last year's marathon was para-titled "14 movies in 3 days", which isn't nothing. This year I started early due to some unexpected time off. I decided to divide my time between cross stitching and shitty movie watching. The two just go hand in hand. Generally, I start Christmas Eve, If we have company I throw on whichever looks to have the most crowd appeal. Christmas Day is ALWAYS a day of rest. We stay in and watch as many Christmas movies as possible while enjoying our gifts and leftovers, and then the day after Christmas I cap the marathon. I could go up to the new year, but I usually am all holiday'd out by the 26th. Plus I need some Vitamin D and food that is not ham or candy. This year I reached new depths of Holiday insanity. Between my early-December craft sessions and my usual three day marathon I watched a shocking 40 Christmas movies. FORTY. That's not a round number for the month, I haven't made that calculation yet. A record breaking forty-fucking-Christmas movies starring people like Tori Spelling and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. No wonder I'm exhausted. My usual countdown seemed too overwhelming for this number, especially since some were pretty forgettable. Since my hands were basically in constant brainless motion, I decided to pick films that were similarly constantly in brainless motion. What came to pass was an endless loop of Christmas dog movies. How many could there be, you might wonder? An INCALCULABLE amount. Or at least like, 75.

How many did I watch?: 6 , and 1 cat movie. I wish I could flip that ratio but I think it's safe to say that people who love Christmas, hate cats, Because cats or cat owners are the villains in nost of these movies.

So OK, let's do an official Atomic Caravan Holiday Dog Movie Count Down...



6. Adventures of Bailey: A Christmas Hero (2012)

None of these movies are "good", but nothing made me a cringe like the Adventures of Bailey. For starters, I can assure you he is NOT a Christmas Hero, in fact, he basically ruined Christmas for everyone. There's a borderline racist plot involving Native Americans and whether or not they celebrate Christmas. Bailey runs off to see the Indian Medicine man, gets himself and his brother lost, his brother almost DIES from eating poisoned berries. When the medicine man finds and saves his brother, they learn that Native Americans can speak to dogs so they have a conversation about the meaning of Christmas. The kid in this movie has no charisma at all and comes off as a total brat. The film spends a lot of time talking about about how they have to find Bailey and Duke, while not actually doing anything at all. Also, I might have missed something but when the parents drop the kid off at their Quarter-Cherokee Grandpa's house for the weekend, it's not clear to me why the other kids didn't go since they have three children. WHO'S WATCHING THE CHILDREN? Could they just not afford to pay all three kids for that day? This is the kind of movie I would have found lame at any age. No attempt at being entertaining or appealing to kids, just awkward sentimental bullshit. It's insulting.



5. The 12 Dogs of Christmas (2005)

Slightly less nauseating because there seemed to be some actual effort put into the production design, wardrobe and casting. The story is again, totally lame and un-fun, but everything comes together like a real movie at least. They're not totally taking us for a ride. Set in the 1930's, a girl is sent to her estranged Aunt's when her Dad can no longer afford to keep her. Her Aunt lives in a town that hates dogs, There's apparently an old law that says no dogs allowed, she and some other dog lovers save all the dogs, etc, etc. This was the only Christmas animal movie I saw where the dogs didn't speak. They tried to play this one straight, a little too straight for my taste. This was the boring dog movie of the marathon. At least I hated Bailey. I hated it enough to have an engaging roast in my head while watching it. The tone here is just too serious. The one thing it had going for it was a VARIETY of dogs. Is that really a reason to watch a movie?




4. Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups (2012)

There's an inexplicable allure to the many straight-to-video entries in the Air Bud franchise. I don't exactly know how it's come this far. Was Air Bud even good to begin with? I can't remember. It must be like the Witchcraft series. The first wasn't good but it was probably a little better than expected so they signed off on 4,000 sequels. This one stars Mrs. Claus, played by Cheryl Ladd, who's more of a Mary Poppins kind of character than any Mrs. Claus I've ever seen. She goes to a town filled with Christmas spirit to try and find a new um, human representative or something? She doesn't realize she's harboring the Santa Puppies and that they've stolen the head elf's (Mickey from Seinfeld) magic crystal which grants wishes. When a kid passively wishes everyone's Christmas spirit would go away, and it does, all the dumb Christmas movie shit starts happening. Gotta save Christmas, so on and so forth. This one was easier to digest than the previous two, that certainly doesn't make it a good movie. Mediocre, at best. The little girl sings "Oh Holy Night" and got that shit stuck in my head HARD. The weirdest, and most notable visual was Santa's bizarre hair piece...

3. The Search for Santa Paws (2010)

I Thought this was the first one, though apparently Santa Buddies is, and I didn't get around to that one. So, supposing I didn't miss anything, which I doubt, Santa Paws was surprisingly, mildly enjoyable. It suffers from all of the same problems that a talking dog Christmas movie WOULD, but it caught me off guard with it's ambitious fantasy element. The magic icicle, crystals and lots of good screen cap moments. The sentiments are still relatively worthless but for a puff piece, it's really not so bad. I found it relaxing to craft by.

2. Beethoven's Christmas Adventure (2011)

Now we're backsliding from mediocre to so-bad-it's-good. Nothing's ever really "good" when you're dealing with this stuff. Honestly, this one got me conceptually. Beethoven is another weird animal Franchise I would have never expected to spawn so many sequels. We all know that Charles Grodin made the first two movies good (And ALL movies with Charles Grodin, right?). I always felt they had sort of a Jon and Garfield type of relationship, and it works. Boy does it work. But without Charles Grodin, these movies aren't cute. Who are these people who now inhabit Beethoven's life? What happened to Charles Grodin? Excuse me, George Newton? Do I want to know? Not really. But what you all must know about the course Beethoven's life took is that he now talks and his voice is TOM ARNOLD. What I find really disturbing about this casting choice is that history has now been re-written. He was Tom Arnold all along. I feel betrayed.




1. Hercules Saves Christmas (2011)

If there's one talking dog Christmas movie you see, let it be Hercules Saves Christmas. It's just full of weird. There is SO much wrong with this movie that it completely implodes on itself with Wiseauian precision. Let's start with the casting: The "kid" is not a kid at all, he's basically an adult. He could probably buy cigarettes and vote. The man who it is implied will become his adoptive father is in my opinion, too YOUNG. He looks mid-thirties at the latest. There's also something off about the cast of elves, extremely unprofessional and bordering dwarfsploitation. I also thought that a pit bull was a strange choice for a kids movie lead dog. I like pit bulls as much as the next guy, or any docile canine that isn't trying to rip my face off. From a practical stand point, they kind of have a reputation and also they just don't have the same visual cuddly appeal that a Golden Retriever or St. Bernard has. After a bit of research I found out that the creator of the animal planet show "Pit Boss" is responsible for this mess. It all made sense after that. It's essentially a vanity project in the form of a talking dog Christmas movie. Who could ask for more? Hercules is Shorty's real life pit bull, which explains the lack of um, star power? He also does the voice for Hercules AND plays the priest at the orphanage. I also have a better understanding of why the elf population is so erratic. They're dog wranglers, not actors. In addition to the cast being totally bizarre, the general tone of this film is so off. Long stretches with no music, weird editing choices, parody level green screen fantasy sequences and a villain that is painted up like a Juggalo. At one point during a particular awkward piece of dialog, I was reminded of the infamous so-bad-it's-good masterpiece "Ben and Arthur", if that gives you any idea what level this reaches. This is one of the most entertaining movies I've seen all month and I wouldn't have discovered if I hadn't committed so much time to New Dogsmas. So in the end, it was all worth it. I've found a new garbage fart to add to the hall of fame.  A classic to revisit, time and time again. It's a Christmas miracle.



*BONUS ROUND....


Santa Claws (2014)

I watched a very different kind of Christmas movie called Santa Claws last year. Paralleled only by season and probably budget. This one was put out by Asylum, so you know the drill. It has a Christmas story arch that really gets on my nerves. The whole; not believing in Santa in a world where Santa really exists. This is VERY perplexing. If he exists then isn't it kind of irrefutable? I mean, gifts show up for children. Wouldn't it be like this insane phenomenon? So in Santa Claws, a girl actually sees him turn to gold dust and tornado himself up her chimney but then grows into a woman who doesn't believe in Santa. And in turn won't let her kid celebrate Christmas. Not even a tree, not even a present. So RUDE, almost abusive. The kittens save Christmas, and make her a believer again. That's all I got. While I appreciate that someone said "HEY, enough with the Dog movies, can we get like ONE Christmas Cat movie?". Here it is. Take it or leave it.


In Part 2 I'll give a more general breakdown of some of the highs and lows in the non-dog related Holiday Horrible-Thon. Bye for now!