Gavin Bard - HecklerSpray

Kardashians Better than Ebola, Worse than Lice (and Nickelback)

January 13th, 2013 By Gavin Bard

Ever wonder if the Kardashians were more favorable than North Korea? Or if Lindsay Lohan is more?palatable?than a colonoscopy? If you said yes, than do I have the poll for you.

Even if you don’t live in ‘murrica, not to be confused with the once great and powerful country called the United States of America (1776-1981), you may still know that we have found ourselves in a few sticky situations with the various systems that make up our society. Perhaps the stickiest of these is Congress, where a bunch of totally batshit rich old people are currently squatting and making things quite difficult for the rest of the country to, you know, not be poor, miserable, and full of bullet holes.

7 Most Underrated Slasher Movies of All Time

October 26th, 2012 By Gavin Bard

Michael Meyers. Jason Vorhees. Freddy Krueger. These are all names I’m sure immediately bring to mind oversexed teens running for their lives directly into highly gory, and even more highly elaborate, deaths. But what about other names that deserve to be among those hallowed heavyweights of Halloween?

What about Matt Cordell? Angela Baker? Leslie Vernon? These are some truly demented fictional constructs on display and they deserve their time in the sun. Or I guess time in the dark. In their supermarket. Or cabin. Or carnival. Or whatever themed hell they decide to use as a staging ground for making the next class elections a bit thinner in the candidate department.

Bryan Cranston and Actors Who Revived Their Careers

October 27th, 2012 By Gavin Bard

Some actors start hot and stay hot, others just fizzle out after a while or never get the chance to get on a hot streak to begin with. The even rarer category of actors is the one Bryan Cranston belongs to. The guys who plug along, get a break, lose the break, and then get an even bigger one after everybody forgot about them.

Second chances and life don’t really go hand in hand all the time, and in acting they are even lesser acquaintances. I mean, you don’t hear us talking about the kid that played Anakin Skywalker right? Or about the great contributions to acting that guy from Troll 2 has made. Then again, maybe they just didn’t get their second chance yet.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for that Anakin kid though. He really was awful.

11 Alien Movies You Must See (That Aren’t “Alien”)

October 23rd, 2012 By Gavin Bard

One of the most common plot points in sci-fi movies are creatures from other planets. It makes for easy movie fodder, since humanity’s inherent curiosity in what else inhabits this bizarrely improbable universe of ours draws us directly to stories involving aliens. The truth is out there. In movies at least, because every alien sighting in real life is just swamp gas and weather balloons.

At least that is what the guys in black suits tell me.

Maybe the tight-lipped government stance on space monsters is the reason there are dozens, if not hundreds, of alien movies that could have been on this list. Hence why I am trying my damnedest to block ET and his gooey xenomorph friend out of the box. Hopefully it works out better than trying to keep Back to the Future off my time traveling list.

5 Hockey Movies to Watch During the NHL Lockout

October 21st, 2012 By Gavin Bard

Gary Bettman, the weaselly grim reaper of the National Hockey League, is quite possibly the worst human being in the world. I know, I know, we have no shortage of options for that designation. Hell, we write about a whole lot of them right here on HecklerSpray. It isn’t like the celebrity world is teeming with actual well balanced role-models or anything.

Still, if I had to vote on the one person I would currently vote off the island ? the island in this analogy being the entire planet of Earth ? it would be this particular hollow suit. He helps represent everything that is wrong with human greed and, even worse, forces me to be on the side of millionaires – because the only thing worse than a millionaire is a billionaire.

So while Gary Bettman helps the NHL’s owners put a pillow over the face of North American hockey, remember that if you need a fix of ice cold action, the movie industry has you covered. At least nobody in that business are greedy vultures who want to make millions of dollars to add to their millions of dollars at the expense of the people who actually do the work.

Right?

7 Action Movie Sequels More Disappointing Than Taken 2

October 15th, 2012 By Gavin Bard

The first Taken made 200 million dollars despite getting a lukewarm reaction from the critical community, which is exactly what you expect from an entertaining action movie. Action flicks aren’t usually made to be enjoyed by career critics or theater goers who only enjoy movies with tons of artistic merit instead of arterial blood spray.

I’m as pretentious as I am blood thirsty, so I enjoy ennui as much as explosions but can entirely acknowledge that Taken was 90 minutes of awesome even if it only had a few ounces of brains spread across that duration. This is a natural?occurrence.

Taken 2: Electric Boogaloo, however, somehow figured out a way to be almost indistinguishable from its predecessor, but without any of the interesting or engaging parts that made it such a sleeper hit. Even as tepid-to-vehement as the reaction has been to Taken 2, there are still plenty of other action movie follow ups that were way bigger duds. Most of these didn’t even make 200 million dollars even though they were poorly developed cash grabs. Taken 2 has that distinction all to itself.

7 Couples That Make Chris Brown and Rihanna Look Stable

October 13th, 2012 By Gavin Bard

Recently, not a day has gone by without a healthy dose of speculation regarding the relationship between Chris Brown and Rihanna. Whether it is morbid curiosity, legitimate disgust, or not having anything better to worry about, people are incredibly interested in them.

Even I’m not immune to keeping an eye on the Increasingly Poor Decisions of Rihanna starring David Cross, as I always find it interesting to see a mutli-millionaire public icon make the same bad life choices that broke waitresses I went to high school with do.

One thing we shouldn’t forget, other than the fact nobody should really actually give a shit about either of these people and what generically terrible relationship decisions these two make, is that it could always be worse.

The 9 Most Brainless Zombie Movies of All Time

October 12th, 2012 By Gavin Bard

The best zombie movies use the shambling reanimated corpses as allegories. George Romero, the father of the dead, used zombies to represent everything from racism to consumerism as well as demonstrating that the most dangerous thing to humanity is ourselves. Pretty powerful considering the antagonists are as silent as they are numerous.

The worst zombie movies, on the other hand, use zombies to represent capitalizing on a trend and making as much money as possible before writing off their losses when the tax man comes. The movies that go this route end up being as mindless and slow as their subject matter.

It is safe to say that there are far, far, far more examples of the latter than there are the former. This could have been the top ? just based on the SyFy channel alone.

The 5 Most Intelligent Time Travel Movies Ever

July 7th, 2017 By Gavin Bard

With the release of Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Bruce Willis Jr.’s new film Looper hitting the theaters, I was reminded that every so often Hollywood ends up making a time travel movie that actually has a bit of a brain behind it. Smart movies are few and far between, but smart time traveling movies are a rarity that springs forth once every hundred Timecops.

A smart movie about time travel is a different thing than a smart movie about, say, actual science. When a movie like ?The Core? comes out and just acts like the world can stop spinning without much consequence, or when ?The Day After Tomorrow? says you can walk from Philadelphia to New York in three days during the ice age, you’ve got a stupid movie. There isn’t really any science for time travel to be held up against. Instead, a smart time travel movie is a movie that at least pretends the subject is serious and realistic.

7 Bad Ass On-Stage Incidents More Punk Than Green Day

October 4th, 2012 By Gavin Bard

A very long time ago, Green Day was a punk band. A fairly decent one too. Like most aging rockers though, they reinvented and retooled until they became the alt-rock advertising powerhouse thing they are today. Never has the disparity between what they were and what they are been more on display than at the ?I Heart Radio? festival.

No, I don’t mean the fact that they were performing at a show called ?I Heart? anything shows that they put their punk balls in the industry’s hands a long time ago. I mean the fact that Billy Joe smashed his guitar, made fun of Justin Beiber with all the laziness of a Jay Leno staff writer, and then left the stage exactly when they told him to. Then he went into rehab. Punk fucking rock.