Are you a man...or a mouse?!?!?!?

That is the question I ask you the reader this week. Most of this year, besides being absent from the blog, I have been trying to put up a review of some of the latest that the Hollywood crap machine can generate. This Friday however, I am stuck between writing a review of the latest from Jack Black (or as I know him: Johann Schwartz) Nacho Libre and this article I found concerning how wild rats are less prone to contracting disease than lab rats who live in antiseptic conditions. So I'm going to combine the two.

Nacho Libre, starring Johann Schwartz, is the story of a rat who lives and works in a Mexican monastery that oddly enough includes a nun, the fetching Sister Encarnación. The remarkable thing about Nacho is the fact that his immunoglobulins are four times higher than your standard monastery rat. Nacho is forced to become a Lucha libre (Spanish for Free Luka an obvious metaphor for the abused children at the monastery's orphanage)...where was I, oh yes, a lucha libre wrestler fighting to win money to feed the orphans better food.

Jack Palance stars as Nacho's nemesis, El Quijada Cuadrada, who uses his jaw to open beer bottles for the other Lucha libre wrestlers. El QC uses a 20 penny nail to fasten his left forearm to an antique sideboard to impress the lovely Sister Encarnación, which in turn drives Nacho to the point of insanity which isn't too far if you've seen any of Johann's other movies. Nacho whips up a postre which contains bubonic plague, E. coli, Ebola, and Splenda and serves it to El QC in hopes it will do away with his challenger. El QC is not affected by the dessert but does get a blister on his fist from the repeated beatings he metes out to the rubbery Nacho.

In the end Nacho inadvertently sets off a thermonuclear explosion beneath the monastery which only further enrages Jack Palance to the point that he incinerates half of the population of the earth with laser beams from his eyeballs. Nacho is then disemboweled by Palance who uses him for a ventriloquist dummy in a surprisingly poingnant show about youth suicide.

Sister Encarnación cries.

(Sounds of Stew being wheeled off to the insane asylum for another round of shock therapy.)