Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
Recently some joker spread a phony story on the internet about how Kurt Russell had tricked Paramount into greenlighting ESCAPE FROM EARTH, a third Snake Plissken movie, as part of a three picture deal. I knew it was too good to be true, but I also know that Russell always says Snake is his favorite character he’s ever played, and he clearly loves working with John Carpenter. Carpenter could use a return to the big screen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if after Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF comes out next year (starring Kurt Russell as a killer stuntman and scored by Carpenter) there is a rise in popularity and nostalgia for the classic Kurt Russell badass roles. I think it would actually be smart to make a new Plissken movie right now as long as it wasn’t a huge budget and it wasn’t a rehash of the other two. So, their loss I guess. And the world’s.
Of course, reading this horse shit got ME nostalgic for the old John Carpenter badass movies, so I watched THEY LIVE again, because that’s my favorite (sorry Kurt). And then I did something I never did before, I watched ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ESCAPE FROM L.A. in a row, to get a better comparison. It’s sort of like one of those puzzles where there’s two similar drawings and you have to pick out what’s different. Hey, wait a minute, that baseball player is holding an ear of corn instead of a bat and shit like that. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, but they have Highlights there sometimes. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Carpenter, Kurt Russell
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 30 Comments »
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
After watching PREDATOR for the first time since the ’80s and realizing that it’s actually a good movie, I decided to watch PREDATOR 2. I never seen this one before and I knew the reputation wasn’t too good. More ominous, instead of John McDIEHARDTiernan the director is Stephen LOST IN SPACE Hopkins. Not lookin good.
But damn if the opening isn’t a scorcher. It starts out with the familiar Predator POV heat vision in the jungle… but as it pans across you realize it’s not the jungle – it’s the outskirts of Los Angeles. THE URBAN JUNGLE! In the futuristic year of 1997. (Think about it: a Predator is loose in Los Angeles at the same time Snake Plissken is looking for the president in New York. Meanwhile, the Spice Girls are topping the charts and TITANIC is breaking box office records.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Predator series, Stephen Hopkins
Posted in Action, Horror, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
or Max Von Sydow’s Badass Revenge
Recently on The Ain’t It Cool News I reviewed this movie CHAOS, which is a rip-off of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (not on purpose, I am assured by the filmatists) which itself was an update of THE VIRGIN SPRING. One of the talkbackers, Readingwriter, was annoyed that I didn’t mention VIRGIN SPRING in the review. He had a good point that it would’ve been interesting to compare all three of them, not just those two, and I’m sure I would’ve done that if I had actually seen VIRGIN SPRING. But I hadn’t.
Until now. Today, I return to the topic armed with a new, more Swedish perspective of the classic revenge tale. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ingmar Bergman, Max von Sydow, rape-revenge, revenge, Swedish cinema
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is one of the most notorious of the revenge pictures. Why? I bet it’s mostly because the title is so good. LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is a great title too, because it sounds cool but it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s enigmatic. I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is the opposite approach, it’s blunt and harsh and to the point. Whoever this is that’s speaking the title, he or she DOES NOT like you. That much is clear.
Until my recent run-in with CHAOS and David “The Demon” DeFalco I never thought too much about watching this one. Why should I watch a movie that tells me it spits on my grave? But with all the ensuing discussion of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT a couple people recommended this one to me and I thought, ah, what the hell. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Camille Keaton, Meir Zarchi, rape-revenge, revenge
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Sunday, August 27th, 2006
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
This is not the best review Vern has ever written.
This is the best review anyone has ever written.
I heart Vern. Very, very much. I advise you to read every word of this one and savor it. Film criticism genuinely gets no better than this.
Well boys, there’s this horror movie called CHAOS that comes out on DVD at the end of September. I thought it would be good to review it now so that you will have forgotten about it by then. I wouldn’t recommend watching the movie – in fact, if possible, I recommend not ever hearing of it. Just stop reading now, unread the first part of this paragraph, and don’t think about it again. We’re only encouraging them. By reviewing this movie I’m just giving the dipshits who made it the attention they’re waving their dicks around begging for, but I want to review it for two reasons:
- I’m always up for another round of that stupid “torture porn” debate
- For masochistic horror fans I might recommend borrowing or stealing (but not buying) the DVD just because the extras are so hilariously insane and retarded
CHAOS is a low budget, no imagination, blatant ripoff of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT directed by a former pro-wrestler named David “The Demon” DeFalco. Its one and only claim to fame is that they managed to get a no-star review from Roger Ebert and then they wrote him a letter that lured him into an ongoing debate about violence in movies, as if their movie deserved to be a part of that discussion. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David DeFalco, rape-revenge, revenge
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 41 Comments »
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
If you read my LADY IN THE WATER review you might remember my tangent about a thing I saw on TV called “To Catch a Predator.” Well, HARD CANDY I guess must be the big screen adaptation of that show, but it also works as a prequel to X-MEN PART 3. Ellen Page, the girl who made a bitch out of Juggernaut, does the same thing here with a guy she believes is a pedophile. But instead of “Shadowcat” she’s called “Thong-Girl” and instead of walking through walls her power is tying up a guy and threatening to cut off his balls.
The trailer for the movie was really unsettling because it cleverly stuck to the first 20 minutes of the movie, when Thong-Girl seems to be an innocent 14 year old girl who thinks she’s more adult than she really is, getting in over her head by going to meet a much older guy she flirted with on the internet. The thing was creepy as hell because Ellen Page looks much younger than most horror movie victims, and the guy is a photographer who APPEARS to be a normal guy and therefore you figure must actually be a deranged pervert. You get the idea that the movie is sort of an I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE type scenario where the guy rapes her or tries to rape her, or she finds out he killed her friend, or something, and then she enacts a vicious revenge. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Slade, Ellen Page, Patrick Wilson, revenge, Sandra Oh
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006
THEY LIVE is one of my favorite movies ever. It is probaly the very best version of a rare type of movie I love: the badass action movie that also works as a political statement. BILLY JACK may be more political, but it seems so self important and it has no sense of humor. THEY LIVE is kind of saying the same thing THE MATRIX is saying about a society brainwashed by media and advertising, but it’s saying more than that. It’s about the America of the Reagan years, when everything was geared to help the rich at the expense of the working class. Which for some reason seems awfully familiar today. Huh. Weird.
“Rowdy” Roddy Piper plays Nada, a drifter who walks into town with tools and a sleeping bag on his back. (Hey, what happens to that sleeping bag? I think it disappears.) This is a hero who not only doesn’t drive a sports car, but doesn’t have a car at all. Or a house. Or a job, at first. The plants are closing, the jobs are drying up, that’s why he’s on the move. But he happens to get a construction job, where he meets Frank (Keith motherfuckin David from THE THING) and finds out about a homeless encampment near a church where some nice people serve food for the homeless. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: John Carpenter, Keith David, Roddy Piper
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 14 Comments »
Monday, August 21st, 2006
For me SNAKES ON A PLANE is like an ex-girlfriend: my feelings toward it are complicated. There is alot to say about my relationship with this movie, and I’m gonna try to say it all. But it all boils down to this: I used to think I loved SNAKES ON A PLANE, but now I just want to be friends.
I still fondly remember those glory days when all it was was a title on IMDB for a movie that Ronny Yu was actually gonna direct, and yes it was about what it sounded like it was about. The perfect concept for a Ronny Yu movie and the perfect title for a movie period. So simple, so blunt, so minimalistic, like some kind of Asian poem style that’s not as well known as haiku because it’s too hard to do, but in this case somebody did it. Four words, four syllables, no more than necessary, no extra flourishes. Boiled down to its basic elements. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David R. Ellis, Julianna Margulies, Kenan Thompson, Lin Shaye, Samuel L. Jackson
Posted in Action, Reviews, Thriller | 12 Comments »
Saturday, August 19th, 2006
PREDATOR starts out with a shot of an alien spacecraft jettisoning a shuttle towards earth. We just see it from the distance, there’s not alot of detail visible, but we don’t live under a rock, so we know what’s going on here. The extra-terrestrial hunting enthusiast known only as “Predator” is arriving on Earth. The human characters in the movie get all the screen time, but Predator gets the first shot, so we know this is really his story.
Like E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, PREDATOR doesn’t give us any backstory on the alien star. All we know is the guy is no botanist. Maybe an exotic meat salesman. It almost seems like an alien remake of FIRST BLOOD because you got this one crazy alien maniac out in the jungle by himself, taking on a couple platoons worth of elite soldiers and doing a pretty good job of it. John Rambo did some sick shit but he didn’t skin a bunch of guys and hang them upside down from the trees. He didn’t pull out people’s spines. So Predator’s got one on John. You even get the scene where Predator, like John, is wounded and has to do some makeshift surgery on himself. The only difference is he uses advanced alien technology to heal himself instead of just crudely sewing himself up. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Duke, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, John McTiernan, Predator series, Sonny Landham, Val Verde
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 16 Comments »
Sunday, August 13th, 2006
Hey folks, Harry here – with the latest from Vern. This time, Vern tackles the ever evolving career of one, Wesley Snipes. I miss Wesley Snipes. He was never just the muscle action guy and I kinda hate that THAT is what he’s becoming in these cheap straight to DVD flicks. Snipes is a dramatic actor of an immense amount of range. He just needs to calm down and begin straightening out a lot of the bad press he’s had – and just do the work. Put himself in some independent films – showing his range and humility and getting back to where filmmaker’s won’t be taking a “chance” directing him, but taking the OPPORTUNITY to use him. He’s incredibly talented, I just want to see that back on screen again. Here’s Vern to tell us if we see any of that talent in HARD LUCK…
HARD LUCK
Well boys, time for another chapter in the ongoing drama THE MYSTERY OF WESLEY SNIPES, where we explore why a talented individual who starred in the three hit BLADE movies keeps doing nothing but straight to video. This new one, HARD LUCK, comes to video in October. While it’s not a particularly good movie, and it definitely shouldn’t be released theatrically, it’s at least a step up from the generic and sometimes horrible DTV action movies he’s been doing lately. It’s kind of a quirky crime movie with some occasional funny touches and an unorthodox (but not revolutionary) structure. The big news is that it reunites him with NEW JACK CITY’s Mario Van Peebles, who is director, co-writer and co-star of HARD LUCK. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, Mario Van Peebles, vampires, Wesley Snipes
Posted in AICN, Comic strips/Super heroes, Crime, Drama, Martial Arts, Reviews | 1 Comment »
