Worst President Ever

This weekend, my girlfriend and I watched the movie "13: Game of Death" which we borrowed from Blockbuster. It's a Thai movie that's a lot like "Saw", "Untraceable", "Eagle Eye", and "The Running Man" rolled into one, and apparently the actual name of the movie is 13beloved, as that is the name of the website running things. Of course, who's running the game is a big mystery, but like all big mysteries in movies and books, it's always either the person who was introduced at the very beginning and they assume you'll forget about, someone who isn't introduced until the very end and it's total bullshit, or someone who's so central to the plot that it doesn't even make sense for it to be them. That or it's Columbo and you know who the killer is in the first five minutes. Anyway, I recommend renting this movie, but if you're too lazy or poor to go rent it, then here's how shit went down.

The movie starts with some Boy Scout helping an old lady cross the street. No, I'm not joking. She's like stuck in the middle of the street and he helps her get across before traffic starts again, but he drops his cell phone while doing it. After he gets her to safety, he spends about five seconds watching the timer count down on the little "walk" light, and only after traffic begins moving again does he run into the street to get his phone. He has a really good sprint going and could have just grabbed the phone and kept going, but he stops once he grabs the phone. He stops right in front of a bus. Dumbass.

Now we meet the main character. IMDB tells me his name is Pusit, and since I don't remember what the called him that's fine. We basically spend the first five minutes finding out his life kinda sucks, and then we see him get fired making his life really suck. He's out in the stairwell pissed off and stuff, and then out of no where police sirens start blaring. No, he's not about to arrested too, it's his fucking phone. He has the single most annoying ringtone I have ever heard, and for the rest of the movie I think it's a cop car every time his phone rings. There are also cop cars with sirens in the movie which makes this even more fucking annoying. If he had the theme to Super Mario Bros. as his ringtone we wouldn't have this problem. Anyway, someone on the phone tells him that he was selected from a large pool of people with shitty lives to compete in a game show for a million dollars. However, the movie posters and the DVD box all say $100 million because the actual prize is 100 million baht. I don't care to learn the conversion rate, so I guess we'll say it's for a million dollars. Whoever's on the phone wants to demonstrate their omnipresence, so they ask him if the fly on the wall is annoying him and tell him to kill it, thus beginning the game.

After killing the fly he gets a text message update from his bank showing his account balance. The game just gave him $1,000 for killing a fly. If I could be paid that for every fly I ever killed, I'd be a happy, happy man. His police siren goes off again, and they congratulate him on joining the game. They then explain the rules. He will be given 13 tasks, and will receive a cash reward deposited directly into his bank account for each task he completes. If he fails a task then the game ends and he loses all the money, although I don't think you can just take money back that way. He is also told that if he tries to discover the source of the game or if anyone finds out that he's playing, the game will end. He is also given the option of ending the game himself at any time by simply saying he wants to stop, but they don't mention if he gets to keep the money or not. Needless to say, the movie would be very boring if he tried that anyway so it doesn't matter.

Now comes task number two: eat the fly. If he does this, he will get $5,000. It's pretty gross, but I could easily do that for $5,000. He goes back into the office where he was fired from, thinks about it, then eats it as his lady friend comes over. She's grossed out, but he says it was a vitamin. I like to go to places that have fired me and eat vitamins as a way of sticking it to the man as well, so it's a pretty believable story. He gets another text message showing his bank balance, and then another phone call. At this point they again reveal that he will get a million dollars if he keeps going, and he then yells "$1,000,000?" out loud, making everyone stare at him. The person on the other end of the phone even comments how he's now confused everyone in the office, but that it's okay. Oh phone, you're so all knowing! I still think it's interesting that him yelling that out confused everyone, but they don't have anything to say about the unreasonably loud police siren inside his pants. It's time to leave the office, but thanks to the confidence from the windfall of cash, he can't leave without finding his coworker who made a snarky comment earlier and punching him in the face. Nice.

I think I should be worried, because I was pretty excited about Pusit's third task. He is now being offered $10,000 to go to a nearby daycare center and make three kids cry. I have to say that as excited as I was, I think they really dropped the ball on this one. When he first shows up, there's a kid sucking a lollipop. My girlfriend and I were convinced that he was actually going to take candy from a baby, but instead he shoved the kid onto his ass. Not as classic, but still pretty entertaining. The kid just smiles and gives him a hug though, so at first it looks like he may be at some sort of daycare center for retards. The camera starts panning around and you see all the other kids charging at him. It was then we saw that the kid he pushed, and it looked like every other kid there, was wearing a gi, those robes that martial artists wear. The kids all just kinda tackled him and hugged him though, so he did not take candy from a baby, and he did not get his ass kicked by a drove of mini-ninjas. These crucial lapses in judgment are exactly why Thailand isn't a world power. Anyone, he accidentally breaks a toy and then tries, but fails, to steal another toy, and makes kids cry. Pretty disappointing conclusion to that scene, although there was a flashback to when he was a kid and his drunken, white father was trashing a toy plane he had.

Flash to the police station where the dude he punched wants the guy arrested. The police ask for a name, and at that point we learn that between his coworker, lady friend, and boss, no one knows his last name. Then some people help a homeless man into the police station because some guy just kicked his ass and took his money. What the fuck is that? Even my girlfriend said "No fair, why don't we get to see that!" during this scene, so it's not like I'm just some asshole sadist. Oh well, I guess it's time for task number five.

Yes that's a real restaurant, and yes there's a fresh, steaming plate of shit under that...whatever those metal thingies are called. Luckily, he's told he can have as much time as he needs to eat it. At this point we're treated to a flashback of him as a kid when other kids tried to make him eat shit while calling him a half-breed and calling his mom a whore. Fortunately, we don't have to watch him eat the shit in either timeline, but as he's licking his plate clean, his lady friend walks into the restaurant and sees him. Crazy stalker bitch.

Task 6 is a little more vague. He has to go to a bus stop and give his phone to their agent. Their agent turns out to be a crazy homeless guy who is referring to the bus stop bench as his throne and scaring everyone away. Pusit tries to talk to him, but offends the creepy, dirty homeless man who has like three teeth left and tinfoil in his hair because his breath smells so bad. At this point I feel pretty sure that the movie is supposed to be a comedy. Pusit then presents his phone to the troll as a gift from the far off land of eBay. The guy then tells him to get on the bus, but much less directly. Once on the bus, he hears a phone ringing with the goddamn siren ringtone. Some punk kids find it, and when he tries to grab the phone from them they get into a brawl. The leader of the douchebags and Pusit wind up falling out of the moving bus and into a street market. They continue fighting on the street until Pusit beats the other guy to about an inch of his life with a giant pig leg from a table they destroyed. The people on the street keep him from killing the guy and tell him they called the cops. At that point we hear a siren, but of course it's not the cops, it's a fucking phone on the guy he just beat up. What his actual task was here I don't know, but at least we got a good fight out of it.

The people running the game, and I say people cause I should point out that the voice on the phone keeps changing, can tell he's not thrilled with hurting people, so they give him a chance to help someone. He has to help a guy who's mostly paralyzed out of a well. The dude had a well in his house for some reason, and has been down it for ten days. Now the dude has ten minutes to get him out of the well and call the phone number in his pocket to alert his family. When he gets to the body of the well, he can tell the old man is clearly dead, and the body isn't even real. Well, we can tell the body isn't even remotely real looking, but I guess it's supposed to be real. He starts tying the body to himself so he can climb out, and an arm is giving him trouble, so he just rips it up and throws it out the well. He makes his way to the top but can't pull himself out, so he gets the number out of the corpse's pocket and uses the severed arm to reach his cell phone that's on the floor so he can call the number. When he calls, we see a scene of four people yelling at each other to answer the phone because they're all selfish and lazy. Finally someone answers and they freak out when they find out that their father/grandfather has died and they'll be right over. You would expect at this point that they'd pull up to the house and run in through the door that Pusit came in through. You'd be wrong, because the phone he had to call was in the next fucking room. This guy lived in the same house as his kids and grandkids, and they couldn't be bothered to open a door and see if he was alive. They don't learn anything though, they just ask what the fuck Pusit's doing in their house.

Pusit leaves and, while wondering around at some sort of outdoor concert venue, runs into his ex-girlfriend who looks like she's bruised but it's hard to tell because of her giant sunglasses. And yes, the sun has long since set at this point. Pusit begs her to come back to him and says how he has the money to take care of her now, but she says that even if he had all the money in the world he could never make her famous. At this point we're introduced to her abusive, rocker boyfriend. Police sirens go off and the voice on the phone tells Pusit that he needs to find the chair with the number of this challenge on it and knock the person who's wearing that number unconscious. He finds the chair with the number eight on it, and obviously it's the abusive douchebag who's jacket has an eight on it, so he gladly completes this task. It doesn't occur to him, however, that he needs to hit the asshole in the head to knock him unconscious, so we get a solid minute of him wailing on this dude with a chair. It's great too because he keeps trying to go talk to his ex-girlfriend and the guy keeps trying to get up, so he has to start swinging the chair again. Seriously, if this isn't a comedy movie, I dunno what the fuck it is. I believe it's during this scene we get a bunch of flashbacks of Pusit getting his ass kicked again and again by his father.

Now he suddenly feels bad though, so it's time to take the guy to the hospital. He hails a cab to take the guy, but the cab driver doesn't want blood in his car so they just steal the cab instead. At this point, why not? I'd rather steal a car than eat shit. Oh yeah, I think he has like $250,000 now, and at some point his lady friend discovered that he's doing all this stuff as part of a game on a website called 13beloved. Seriously, he doesn't want to go out with you so you need to just back the fuck off.

As they drop off the body of the slut's boyfriend, we hear police sirens again. Finally, it's an actual fucking police car. The police are now officially trying to find this dude on several counts of kicking ass, one count of car jacking, one count of breaking and entering, one count of exposing a family's negligence, and one count of being a stinky doo-doo head who broke a toy phone. The cop in charge of the investigation also seems to be aware of the game and thinks that if they find this guy that they'll be able to take the game down as well. Pusit now has to run around the hospital for 9 minutes until he's given a room number to go to so he can escape. Anyway, Pusit foolishly takes the elevator and when the doors open there are about half a dozen cops standing around talking. We're then treated to several minutes of Scooby Doo bullshit as he runs all around the hospital trying to get away from them. To finally elude them, he hops on a gurney that's in the hall and pulls a blanket over his face. Really? Cops really think that hospitals leave dead bodies hanging around in the hall unattended? Just for fun, after the cops leave a doctor comes over and starts pushing the gurney, so Pusit shoots up and scares him. You can now add one count of chicanery to his rap sheet. Anyway, he finally founds the room he's supposed to go to where we see the old lady who needed to cross the street at the beginning of the movie. He then dresses up in scrubs, puts her in a wheelchair, and escorts her out of the hospital, then is to drive her home.

The 10th task should be a pretty simple one. He's simply supposed to do what she asks him, and what she wants is help fixing her clothesline. Pusit has some trouble cause of the wait of it, but ties the metal line tightly. Now it should occur to him that a clothesline shouldn't be a thin, almost invisible line, it should be like rope or something. He does, however, notice that the clothesline is really long, and discovers it actually goes across the road they're on. Unfortunately, he doesn't notice that until there's a whole biker gang fast approaching. That old woman's a total cunt for having him kill all those people, but at least he's almost done. His lady friend has found him, however, and is pleading for some sort of sanity.

Pusit's phone rings and he's told that the game is now over because she discovered he was playing. However, because he has the highest viewer ratings of anyone to every play before, he is allowed to keep playing if he can complete his 11th task. Among the pile of headless bodies is a samurai sword. Her lost puppy also runs out into the mess of blood and flesh. He must take the sword and either kill her to stop the problem at its source, or kill her dog as a warning to her to back the fuck off. He kills the dog and drives away, but is scolding for making a stupid choice.

The girl tries to go to the police to explain the situation, but it turns out that the cop working reception has been bought out by the game. Isn't that always the way? Then someone comes in saying how some guy slaughtered all their cattle with a samurai sword, so she asks where it is. He said he just wanted to be friends, but she seriously can't take a hint and insists on following him everywhere.

Killing some cows seemed like a pretty tame task for the 12th one as well, but when we go back to the guy we see him stumbling through a hallway covered in blood, and pulling a key out of a cow's bowels. I guess that's a little more gross, but he did just kill like twenty people. He puts the key into a door with a giant thirteen on it, and finally we see the game show portion. There's no audience or anything, but the room looks exactly like the set of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" There's a body seated in a chair with a bag over the head, and on the table next to him is what appears to be an ice pick or needle or something. Pusit pulls the bag off to reveal his abusive, asshole father, and starts having all sorts of flashbacks of his dad breaking his toys, kicking his ass, and killing his dog. It turns out his lady friend has already arrived here somehow, probably because like all action oriented movies, the protagonist is now no longer walking or running, but can only move in this sort of slow lurching fashion. I guess all the blood on his hands is weighing him down or something. Anyway, she's about to enter the room but she gets chloroformed by a guard and taken to see the guy behind it all.

The girl wakes up in a white room with three guards, and a chair facing at least half a dozen computer monitors showing the room that Pusit is in, the chatroom of all the people involved in the game, and I think one of the screens had an episode of Blues Clues the guy in charge downloaded. So now it's time for the big reveal. Who could possibly be more bloodthirsty than Waylon Smithers? The chair turns around to reveal Blofeld from"You Only Live Twice". No wait, it's that fucking boy scout from the first scene in the movie holding a white cat with two different coloured eyes. See? I told you they'd hope you forgot about him. How ANY of this is fucking possible is beyond me, and I don't care to even try to figure it out. Oh yeah, there's more important stuff in the other room.

So Pusit picks up the thing that looks like an ice pick, and as he picks it up it turns out it's actually a giant knife that was just being shown perfectly from the side. I don't know if it was intentionally shot that way or not, but I would've rather known it was a knife all along. He holds the knife above his dad and starts having flashbacks again. He flashes back to when he was a kid and was in the exact same position of trying to kill his dad while he slept. Then he has the same flashbacks from earlier, but different. The one where the kids tried to make him eat shit actually ended with his dad chasing all the kids away, and the one where he killed the dog was because the dog had rabies and needed to be put down. He thrusts the knife forward and sticks the knife through the chair, missing his father. The girl in the other room sees this and smiles saying that the game is over. We go back to the important room and the wall turns out to be a a giant, circular screen. Pusit looks around as the screens show the words "Congratulations! The winner is...". After all that killing and bizarre shit, he actually gets the money even though he wasn't able to go through with it? Was this actually a test of his humanity to see if he could come back from the brink of oblivion? Suddenly, the camera pans down to show the knife through Pusit's chest with blood pouring out. His father pulls the knife out again and slices his throat, then throws his arms in the air victoriously as his sons lifeless body collapses in front of him. The words "Congratulations! The winner is..." fade from the screens, and are replaced with the words "MR. JOHN ADAMS!".

Never trust whitey.

dr_jeebus@sydlexia.com

Look, stay away from me special la...just stay away from my fucking lady friend!