Have you or a loved one experienced COMMENT BLOCKAGE? You could be entitled to not having that anymore. Sorry everybody, I’ve heard from several people that their comments have been blocked for days or weeks on end. One person fixed it by using a VPN and one by switching to mobile, but neither should be necessary. If you’re getting blocked, Chris asks if you could highlight the url in the browser and screenshot along with the error message to help us narrow down the problem. You can send that to me at outlawvern at hotmail dot com. Thanks for your patience.
Archive for the ‘Blog Post (short for weblog)’ Category
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Tuesday, February 18th, 2025Talking Rumble in the Bronx with ‘All ’90s Action, All the Time!’
Wednesday, January 29th, 2025
I swear I didn’t plan to be overexposed on podcasts this month, I just take them when I can get ’em and this is how it works out sometimes. When All ’90s Action, All the Time! invited me to come on this season I thought a great movie to talk about would be RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. Obviously it was one of Jackie Chan’s big breakthroughs in the west, even more obviously it is by far the most realistic depiction of New York and gangs ever put on film, including documentaries filmed in New York about actual gangs. It was an important movie to me and sums up some things about the personality of the decade.
I did Larry’s podcast!
Thursday, January 23rd, 2025Longtime commenter Sternshein has a podcast called Reel Early where he talks to people about their history of movie love. I had a great time finally having a conversation with him, and we talked about video stores, working as a projectionist, writing reviews and other stuff. I talked about a few parts of my life I haven’t talked about before – sorry if it ruins my mystique. But check out the podcast, there are some good episodes with other people you’ve seen around here like Fred Topel and Mark Palermo. Thanks Larry, I had a great time!
Happy Sweet Potato Day
Thursday, November 28th, 2024
Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate. I can’t stop worrying about shit but I have much to be thankful for, including/especially all the great people here, the fact that anybody still reads my reviews, takes my recommendations, recommends things to me, and wants to hang out and talk about it with me and the community here you’ve all helped create. I hope you can have some good food today, maybe see family or friends, maybe avoid them if that’s better. I’ll keep striving and I hope you do too. Thanks everybody!
Man, I don’t know.
Wednesday, November 6th, 2024I wish I had it in me to write something beautiful and optimistic and give everybody some solace. Should’ve prepared something in advance, I guess. Right now it feels like the bad guys won for the rest of my lifetime and it’s hard to even think or do anything. Evil, chaotic times ahead. I’ll be back on my movie review bullshit soon I hope but for now I need to regroup. Take care everybody.
Programming note
Thursday, September 5th, 2024
I’m going on a week long trip for family stuff, so I will not be posting any new reviews next week, and possibly the week after that (depending on how fast I get rolling again). So consider this my end of summer break and/or your break from me. But I promise after I get back I’ll catch up on new releases I miss like Jeremy Saulnier’s REBEL RIDGE and Hot Topic’s BEETLEJUICE2, and hopefully I’ll get in some time to enjoy the freedom of September, when I’m out of summer mode but not fully in Halloween mode and can just review whatever random things catch my interest for a bit. Have fun everybody, be respectful, no parties, I left some money on the table to get pizza and rent videos.
early review on Patreon: THE PRIMEVALS
Wednesday, May 29th, 2024
For those who currently do or want to start patronizing me on the ol’ Patreon, I have posted my review of THE PRIMEVALS, Full Moon’s Yeti vs. lizard men movie that was the passion project of their top stop motion animator David Allen, first pitched in the late ’60s, filmed in 1994, and thought dormant when he died without quite finishing it in 1999. Now it’s been miraculously unfrozen and coming to VOD soon.
If you’re not able to or don’t want to give me money, I get it and I plan to post this particular one for free here very soon. But I gotta self promote and remind you every once in a while that for less than it costs to buy a refrigerator magnet at the $1.01 Store you can get access to a bunch of exclusive posts and help me continue to work only part time at the day job and put most of my time and mental focus into providing you the good shit here at outlawvern.com. Thank you!
CLICK HERE TO MEET THE PRIMEVALS TODAY!
Vern’s Oscar Round-Up and 2023 Recap Thing
Thursday, March 7th, 2024
For some years now, some of you may remember, I’ve made it a point to watch all of the best picture nominees. This year, for the first time ever, I’d already seen all of them when the nominations were announced. Achievement unlocked, as they say in whatever they say that in.
Since I was ahead of the game there I thought maybe I could also review them all for the first time ever. I always don’t get around to a couple of them, and that’s what happened this year too. I did review AMERICAN FICTION and ANATOMY OF A FALL together, as well as BARBIE, MAESTRO, OPPENHEIMER, POOR THINGS and THE ZONE OF INTEREST. The ones I missed were THE HOLDOVERS, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and PAST LIVES, so I’ll say a little about them now. (read the rest of this shit…)
Talking Seagal with The Suspense is Killing Us
Wednesday, May 17th, 2023
Some years ago I appeared on a podcast called The Suspense is Killing Us to discuss RICOCHET and two other Denzel movies. (Here’s the episode.) These are my real life friends but I think even if they weren’t I would endorse this podcast because it has the great goal of analyzing the kind of thrillers that were so big in the ’90s but don’t exist much anymore, and because they make me laugh out loud all the time.
That was episode 7, and 107 episodes later I’m finally returning. They do sometimes stretch the definition of what type of movie they can cover, and they wanted to do THE GLIMMER MAN (Seagal’s closest to fitting the type of movies they usually do). Tasked with choosing two other Seagal pictures for them to watch I went with one of the more definitively good ones (HARD TO KILL) and one of my favorite crazy ones (BELLY OF THE BEAST).
I really haven’t revisited Seagal’s movies much in recent years so it was great to have an excuse to do it and find that I can still enjoy them. Theirs is also the only podcast I’ve been able to do in person, which obviously is a different experience from calling in. I really recommend this podcast in general, it’s always a fun time, check it out.
THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING US EPISODE #114: FLOCK OF SEAGALS (with VERN)
Profiles in Badass #9: Michelle Yeoh (from the archives)
Thursday, March 16th, 2023
FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE…
In 2019 and 2020 I wrote a dozen Profiles in Badass columns for a new online outlet called Rebeller. It was pitched to me as a “Fangoria for action movies” that would bring together people from all across the political spectrum. It turned out to be more of an anti-PC thing that caused me stress and shame until I quit.
I didn’t pay for a membership so I never saw the comments, and have no idea if people enjoyed my columns or dragged them across concrete. The only reader feedback I saw (other than from regulars here) was when some prick on Twitter shamed them for caving to the PC woke anti-male agenda or whatever by publishing my column about Michelle Yeoh (which he declined to read). Only the sharpest, most reasonable minds over there.
But considering Michelle Motherfuckin Yeoh’s recent upgrade to ACADEMY AWARD WINNER MICHELLE MOTHERFUCKIN YEOH I am re-upping that column for anyone who wants to know more about her filmography. For historical purposes I’m leaving it as I submitted it, but I have two corrections to make:
1) I repeatedly referred to Yuen Woo-ping as “Woo-ping” when his surname is Yuen. Sorry about that. I guess I thought we were friends.
2) At that time I still believed Yeoh did a real motorcycle jump onto that train in SUPERCOP; The Art of Action later informed me that Bruce Law did a jump over the train onto boxes and the landing was Yeoh being lowered onto the train with a very cool wire rig. (Still a great stunt, but very different from what I always believed and spread the legend of.)
(read the rest of this shit…)
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