Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
RE-ANIMATOR is one of those good old ’80s college buddy movies, you know? You got the tall, blandly handsome star student Dan (Bruce Abbott), he’s fucking the dean’s daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton), there’s an uptight professor, Dr. Hill (David Gale – the one from SAVAGE WEEKEND, who I still don’t think is the same one THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE is about), who disapproves of the relationship. Then a new student comes to Miskatonic U., the socially inept but brilliant Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), who maybe got kicked out of his school in Switzerland, or maybe had to flee. A troublemaker! Double secret probation!
Dan seems like a jock, Herbert like a nerd. Dan is a normal person, Herbert a creepy weirdo. And they become roommates! It would be fun if it was about Dan trying to loosen him up, bringing him to parties and stuff, or to pledge at a fraternity, but maybe that’s in the sequels.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott, David Gale, H.P. Lovecraft, Jeffrey Combs, Stuart Gordon, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 37 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2013
GIRLS NITE OUT would’ve been a decent title for KILLER PARTY. I’m not completely sure how it applies to this one. It’s another college movie, and it focuses at least as much on male basketball players angry about their girlfriends leaving them as it does on the group of sweater-wearing girls whose idea of a nite out is to follow along with a scavenger hunt contest put on by the campus radio station for part of the movie until it gets cancelled due to murders.
This is a lower-mid-level Slasher Search find. On one hand, it’s definitely not good, and doesn’t even have any heads chopped off or eyeballs poked out or anything. On the other hand it’s watchable. It has credible enough acting and production values, including some pretty good scoring at times (possibly from library music) and a couple decent oldies on the soundtrack because of the radio station. And of course there’s a little bit of the weird shit, which is absolutely required to get through one of these. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bear costume, Hal Holbrook, Lynn Connors, Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2013
After the massive success of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET in 1984, you’d think Wes Craven would’ve been sitting comfortably atop the horror director pyramid. Yet his directational followups were just the ’85 TV movie CHILLER, the ’86 silly robot movie DEADLY FRIEND, and a couple episodes of the new Twilight Zone. It wasn’t until ’88 that he did something he seemed passionate about, the pretty respected voodoo thriller THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW. By ’89, only five years after the birth of Freddy, he was already at that sad “time to come up with the next Freddy” stage you’d expect him to go through eventually. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Tesh, Mitch Pileggi, Peter Berg, Ted Raimi, TV is violent, Wes Craven
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 30 Comments »
Sunday, October 27th, 2013
Before he did PHANTASM, a 22 year old Don Coscarelli wasn’t even looking to be a horror director. He got together the people he knew and filmed in his neighborhood and made this sweet coming-of-age type comedy about growing up in the California suburbs of the ’70s. Kenny (Dan McCann) is a kid about 12 or 13, his company is Doug (PHANTASM star A. Michael Baldwin) and Sherman (Jeff Roth), a goofy younger kid from across the street who they pick on but start becoming real friends with when they see him getting beat up by Johnny Hoffman (Willy Masterson), the same neighborhood bully they live in terror of.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A. Michael Baldwin, coming of age, Don Coscarelli, Halloween, Reggie Bannister
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Family, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Somos lo que hay) is a one of a kind horror movie out of Mexico. Well, it was one of a kind until they just did an American remake, but it sounds like they changed things up for that one anyway.
The story in the original begins with a man stumbling through an upscale outdoor shopping center, coughing up blood and dying on the pavement, and nobody trying to help him. He kinda seems like he might be homeless, but he’s not. He has a wife and three kids to not come home to. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cannibals, Mexico
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Friday, October 25th, 2013
THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is a Dario Argento movie I hadn’t seen before. This is his directational debut, so it shows what he was up to before the ones I’m most familiar with, DEEP RED, SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. He’s not yet the sicko artiste who made those three, but you can see him headed in that direction.
An American writer (Tony Musante) visiting Italy happens to be walking across the street from an art gallery one night when he sees a struggle going on inside. He runs over but can’t get into the large, plate glass storefront. He knocks on the window but is forced to just watch as a stabbed woman lays bleeding on the floor inside. Then he gets trapped behind another wall of glass. Another passerby brings cops in time to save the woman, but this American at the scene of the crime, and planning to leave the country soon, that doesn’t look too good. So they confiscate his passport.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dario Argento, Ennio Morricone, giallo
Posted in Horror, Mystery, Reviews | 22 Comments »
Thursday, October 24th, 2013
Well, shit. I hope ESCAPE PLAN isn’t the last gasp for straight ahead R-rated theatrically released movies from the ’80s action icons. I guess Schwarzenegger has another one in the works called SABOTAGE. And there’s always the off chance that an EXPENDABLES sequel could be made where they’re trying harder and it mostly works on its own merits, not just nostalgic references and goodwill. We action fans all kinda hoped the EXPENDABLESes would remind the rest of the world that they used to love those types of movies and reignite their popularity, so we could all go see them on the big screen with the loud speakers and with a big crowd excited to experience it together and maybe afterwards there would be some high-fiving, possibly some push ups.
The possibility seemed real enough that we got Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in THE LAST STAND and Sylvester Stallone starring in BULLET TO THE HEAD and now both of them starring in ESCAPE PLAN. All of these movies have been flops at the American box office, even though all of them have been pretty enjoyable, and better than any non-sequels either of these guys have done since the ’90s.
But hey, at least a couple of us were there to appreciate it. ESCAPE PLAN is a solid, enjoyable Stallone vehicle where Schwarzenegger gets to be the joking sidekick. Rob Schneider was busy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 50 Cent, Amy Ryan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Faran Tahir, Jim Caviezel, Mikael Hafstrom, Sam Neill, Sylvester Stallone, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vinnie Jones
Posted in Action, Reviews | 48 Comments »
Thursday, October 24th, 2013
This has been a source of mystery for a couple years now, the weird sounding horror-western that Wesley Snipes filmed right before he got convicted. In fact the prosecutors tried to accuse him of running when he flew to Namibia to film it. Were they just trying to fuck up his life, or did they really believe he was crazy enough to start over there, become the African DTV Roman Polanski? I mean, that would be kinda cool though.
From the early descriptions it sounded like they were trying to do Cowboy BLADE, the promotional materials were amateurish, the director is an unknown and there was always the possibility that “Andrew Goth” was not his real name but a fake one that he actually thought sounded cool. Also, there was reason to believe Wesley needed money and was not necessarily being picky about which projects to do. And then it didn’t come out for six years. So I never had any faith at all that this would be good.
And yes, it’s a mess. First and worst example is the narration, which could be Snipes sounding really weird, but I’m pretty sure it’s a Steven Seagal OUT OF REACH situation. I just thought it was a third person narrator until the last sentence of the opening chunk, where it sounds like a pretty good Blade imitation. Later he’s saying “I” and it’s clearly supposed to be Snipes’s character Aman talking, but it sure doesn’t sound like his voice. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Goth, Diamond Dallas Page, DTV, Jenny Gago, Kevin Howarth, Namibia, Patrick Bergin, Riley Smith, Tanit Phoenix, Wesley Snipes
Posted in Horror, Reviews, Western | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013
Have you guys seen this? THE WIZARD OF OZ? I think it’s pretty well known. Last month they had a one-week re-release in 3D Fake Imax, so I took the opportunity to see it then and I thought I should write a little about it. If you have the 3D getup at home the converted version is now on blu-ray if you’re interested.
Loosely based on the stories of L. Frank Baum, Judy Garland (THOROUGHBREDS DON’T CRY) plays Dorothy Gale, an inquisitive, somewhat agitated girl who lives on a farm with her Aunt nah just kidding I’m not gonna explain the plot to you. Look it up on IMDb you lazy assholes.
Yeah, this movie is almost 75 god damn years old and still loved by each new generation that womankind squirts out, so I’d say it’s a pretty monumental piece of cinematic history. But to be honest it could end up that 200 years from now nobody gives a shit about OZ anymore but BLADE II is still beloved so BLADE II would be considered alot more important in the long game. But regardless of that I think there is room in history for both movies. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Judy Garland, L. Frank Baum, Margaret Hamilton, Ray Bolger, The Munchkins, Victor Fleming
Posted in Fantasy/Swords, Musical, Reviews | 38 Comments »
Monday, October 21st, 2013
I hope this isn’t oversharing, but my first Dario Argento movie was PROFONDO ROSSO, which we call DEEP RED here in the states. I don’t think I knew anything about it when I rented it on a mysterious, seedy looking VHS tape that called it “DEEP RED HATCHET MURDERS.” That’s not the worst title because it is, in fact, about a series of murders, though some of them are done with knives and not hatchets. So the “hatchet” part is kinda misleading. The plural on the “murders,” though, that part was dead on. There’s a bunch of them.
The story begins in Cronenbergian fashion as psychic medium Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril) is doing a public demonstration of her skills, and is suddenly overcome when she senses evil thoughts by someone in the room. Our protagonist is David Hemmings (Dildano from BABARELLA) as British jazz pianist Marcus Daly, who happens to be walking beneath an apartment window as Helga is murdered in a genuinely shocking burst of violence (she’s hit from behind with… yeah, I guess it’s a hatchet, her head crashes through the window and then she drops-throat first onto the edge of the remaining glass. Ouch! And all up there on display like he’s watching an opera. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Daria Nicolodi, Dario Argento, David Hemmings, giallo, Goblin
Posted in Horror, Mystery, Reviews | 48 Comments »
