Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Friday, October 12th, 2012
This MALEVOLENCE is from 2003, not my preferred era of slasher picture, but it was recommended to me by a weirdo, I’d never heard of it before and I didn’t know anything about it. Seemed like a decent lead. Turns out it’s a low budget horror thing but it mixes in a little bit of a true crime influence. It starts out with a kid being kidnapped in 1989, bringing back memories of all those gloomy based-on-a-true-story-if-you-have-seen-a-missing-kid-call-this-1-800-number TV movies from the ’80s. I thought oh shit, did some motherfucker convince me to rent a movie about kids getting tied up in a shed? But then it quickly switches it up and skips ahead ten years.
Some guys are robbing a bank, and their rendezvous point afterwards is an isolated, abandoned house… which they don’t know is by the abandoned slaughterhouse where that kidnapper took that kid in the prologue. And this is just one possibility I’m offering to you here, but maybe there is still a psycho wandering around that area that those guys might run into? Could be. Nobody knows. Could go either way. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Slasher Search, slashers, Stevan Mena, synth score
Posted in Crime, Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Thursday, October 11th, 2012
There’s a pride that comes with renting a movie that I never heard of, that you never heard of, that nobody ever recommended to me before, and finding out it’s something interesting. Man, this one is not what I expected. I’m not saying I discovered an unheralded classic like I did when I stumbled across that Billy Dee Williams movie HIT! when it was only on VHS, but I definitely found an unusual one here.
And it’s all because of Slasher Search. As most of you know, every October I try to find some good slasher movies (preferably from the ’70s or ’80s, but I’m having to get lenient these days) that I’ve never seen before. Every year it gets harder, because the pool gets smaller, and I gotta look for more and more obscure ones, like the ones that haven’t even made it to DVD yet. In this case I got real desperate and ventured out of the horror section and I found this tape in Murder/Mystery/Suspense. It looked like it might be a slasher movie, seeing as how it showed a dude wearing a plastic baby mask holding an ax. Which can be used for slashing, is my contention. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Janusz Kaminski, John P. Ryan, Maureen Teefy, Michael St. Gerard, Slasher Search, slashers, Zero External Reviews on IMDb
Posted in Horror, I don't know, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012
“Either this guy is nuttier than a Snickers, or there is some real heavy shit goin down.”
I’ve had this idea for years that one Halloween I should try to honor my two most covered genres by trying to review a bunch of action/horror crossovers. I knew Chuck Norris had done one, so HELLBOUND was at the top of my list. Unfortunately if this is any indication this is not gonna be one of my more worthwhile expeditions.
Our story begins in 1186 AD when Richard the Lionheart (David Robb, who in my opinion was cast in Downton Abbey based entirely on having this one his resume) battles an evil sorcerer called Prosatanos (Christopher Neame, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, SUBURBAN COMMANDO) and locks him in a tomb using magic daggers. Then it continues in 1951 when some bandits who might’ve been professional acquaintances of Indiana Jones discover the tomb and think it would be a good idea to steal the magic daggers, releasing a force of pure evil that will, you know, cause trouble in 40-some years after he gets all the broken pieces of his shattered Magic Scepter Thing of Evil. Now he wants to conquer the world and presumably plunge it into that “1,000 Years of Darkness” Chuck Norris’s wife warned about in their anti-Obama video.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: action-horror, Chuck Norris
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 28 Comments »
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012
LOOPER is the new time travel related science fictional picture by Bruce Willis. But due to scheduling conflicts Bruce is only in part of the movie, most of the time he’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (SHADOWBOXER) with a fake nose. This one is written and directed by Rian Johnson, the guy that did BRICK.
“Looper” is a made up futuristic word similar to how “Rian” is a made up spelling of a real name. I’m not buying either one. But I did like the movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bruce, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Garett Dillahunt, Jeff Daniels, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paul Dano, Rian Johnson, time travel
Posted in Bruce, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 71 Comments »
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
I meant to see this when it was in theaters in 1988, didn’t get around to it until now. It’s okay. Not worth that long of a wait, but luckily I did other stuff in between.
Treat Williams (THE SUBSTITUTE 2-4) and Joe Piscopo (Saturday Night Live cast, 1980-1984) play two 1980s Movie Cops. Treat is supposed to be the straight laced one, so he wears a suit. Piscopo is the wildman who wears a leather jacket and hits on every woman who appears on camera, because that’s always funny (see also: Jay Leno in COLLISION COURSE). This was after SNL when he got really into bodybuilding, so he also shows off his muscles alot. He’s kind of a cross between a wisecracking Bruce Willis type of character and a crazy Mel Gibson one.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: action-horror, Darren McGavin, Joe Piscopo, Keye Luke, Mark Goldblatt, Professor Toru Tanaka, Robert Yeoman, Steve Johnson, Treat Williams, Vincent Price
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 50 Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2012
In a quest for odd action-horror combos I came across this comic booky French movie that kind of seems like their version of a Milla Jovovich vehicle. Although it came out in 2002 it’s not that slick digital type of fake-looking, like ULTRAVIOLET or a RESIDENT EVIL or something. It’s more of a retro-MORTAL KOMBAT type of look with lots of badly composited red cloudy skies, lightning strikes, green fire, etc. But it could use some aggressive KOMBATtty techno music or guitar-and-drums scoring instead of the shitty keyboard-pretends-to-be-orchestra approach.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: drag queens, French horror, Julien Magnat, Laurent Spielvogel, Olivia Bonamy
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews | 17 Comments »
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012
For my inaugural horror picture of the 2012 Halloween season I chose ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE, an internet-acclaimed indie from 2006 that still hasn’t been released in the U.S. yet because it was bought by the Weinsteins, who proceeded to pull a Weinstein on it. But I rented the UK blu-ray. Rookie director Jonathan Levine went on to direct the also-pretty-good non-horror indie movie THE WACKNESS and last year’s Joseph Gordon Levitt/Seth Rogen/cancer dramedy 50/50. The titleistical Mandy Lane is Amber Heard, who has since played the hot girl in NEVER BACK DOWN, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, ZOMBIELAND, THE STEPFATHER and DRIVE ANGRY.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amber Heard, Jonathan Levine, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 42 Comments »
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
Friends, it is my sad duty to verify reports that Isaac Florentine’s ASSASSIN’S BULLET (formerly titled SOFIA on IMDb, and out on DVD today) is no good. I guess it played a couple of theaters at some point, and it has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t say I really disagree. It’s dull and amateurishly written and even though it has a weird thing going on with being a vanity project for some lady I never heard of, that’s not enough to make it very fun.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christian Slater, Donald Sutherland, Isaac Florentine, Timothy Spall
Posted in Reviews, Thriller | 19 Comments »
Sunday, September 30th, 2012
As I start writing this I haven’t read any reviews or comments on THE MASTER yet, but I’m betting there’s alot of this:
1. It’s a masterpiece, if you don’t get it you’re dumb, why don’t you go see some mainstream movie like whatever that one movie is called, the one that you like, I don’t know the name because I don’t watch that kind of crap or know what it is
2. It’s pretentious nonsense that is pretentious, if you like it it’s Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s totally meaningless. Boring. The critics! Fuck!!!!!
Probly heavier on #2.
I would like to propose a third view, which is B. Kind of in the middle of the two. But in a separate column I think.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amy Adams, Joaquin Phoenix, Kevin J. O'Connor, Laura Dern, Paul Thomas Anderson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 80 Comments »
Friday, September 28th, 2012
When I did my NATURAL BORN KILLERS retrospective a little while back there was one last piece I meant to write, which was about this short film directed by Dr. Dre. I could swear I read a long time ago that Oliver Stone wanted to play the short before NBK but the studio wouldn’t let him. I don’t know, I might’ve imagined it, because it’s not mentioned in the Killer Instinct book and all I can find on Google is references to Stone giving the short “props.”
MURDER WAS THE CASE comes form a song on Snoop’s first album Doggystyle, but it also spawned a hit soundtrack, and it’s on a DVD padded with other videos and various interview and performance clips, all poorly non-anamorphically transferred, but that seems to fit the material.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Art Evans, Charlie Murphy, Dr. Dre, hip hop, Ice Cube, John Amos, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur
Posted in Music, Reviews | 24 Comments »
