Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Monday, March 8th, 2004
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
This got lost in the e-mail last week, which sucks. An unpublished Vern review is like an unrecorded McCartney/Lennon song. Even if it’s for WILD THINGS 2.
Howdy boys
Not sure if you got this review that I sent you boys last week. Maybe you didn’t feel it was up to my meticulous standards. But I feel the people have a right to know. A right to know that there is a WILD THINGS 2.
So yep, I saw WILD THINGS 2. Unneccessary direct to video sequel to underrecognized 1998 John McNaughton masterpiece. And believe it or not I’ve been waiting for this one anxiously. Not expecting it would be anything other than garbage, but just hoping on the off chance that maybe it would be fun. Yeah, I’ll give you two guesses which one it was. The first one. The one about the garbage, and the not being anything other than, or whatever it was I just said. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels
Posted in AICN, Reviews, Thriller | 7 Comments »
Friday, March 5th, 2004
Lately I’ve only been reviewing current movies, but as you know, the Hollywood Reporter had a story the other day that MGM has hired a first time director to do a “re-imagining” of 2001 with “modern pacing and music” that will “take full advantage of state-of-the-art digital effects.” The director is not someone I’m familiar with, but they say he is perfect for the job because he’s done alot of music videos and won a couple of Miss Clio awards for his commercials. So before they ruin it I thought I would revisit Kubrick’s masterpiece of space ballet and shit.
No, don’t worry, I’m just fucking with you. They’re not doing a remake, as far as I know. But you almost believed it, right? Because it’s so awful, so wrong, so undeniably vile, that someone is definitely going to have to do it eventually. They came for Hitchcock and Hooper and Romero and Carpenter and Walking Tall and Amityville Horror and House of Wax and they even tried Billy Jack. They already got Charade and Planet of the Apes and Dr. Seuss. They burrowed into the brains of Lucas and Spielberg and Friedkin and Scott and made them second guess their younger, better selves. And now they’ve got their greedy bastard eyes on Kubrick. You fucking know they do. They’ll wait until his assistant is dead and his assistant’s grandchildren or whatever it takes, but the day it becomes possible, they dig out the contracts and they sign them in blood and they will swallow one end of 2001 and suck it down like one of those threads the yogis use and pull the entire movie out through the ass and into a paper shredder. You already know this, but I’m telling you this, because we need to get this out in the open, for our own good. We need to face the inevitable. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Keir Dullea, masterpieces, Stanley Kubrick
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 7 Comments »
Monday, February 16th, 2004
Did you ever see that skateboarding documentary DOGTOWN AND THE Z-BOYS? Well STOKED is like the depressing, fucked up David Fincher part 3 to that where all the main characters from part 2 (except the cat) get killed offscreen in the opening credits and Z-Boy shaves his head and gets infected and jumps into a pit of molten metal at the end and burns himself up. Except kind of worse. And metaphorical.
Actually alot of this picture is a fun time nostalgia type of deal about a period in the late 1980s or some time like that where young people grew their bangs real long and wore pink helmets and funny pants and went around on skateboards jumping up in the air. In DOGTOWN they were doing wheelies and shit on their skateboards but what they would do according to this one is go into an empty swimming pool or a woooden ramp and they go back and forth real fast. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posted in Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 4th, 2004
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
Nice of Vern to go out of his way to review this sequel since he reviewed the original for us. Personally, I thought this one smelled like a direct-to-video sequel when we watched it at BNAT 5 this year, and I’m not really aching to see any further adventures of the Ginger Snaps sisters. Not every horror film has to inspire a franchise if it makes a few dollars, folks. Anyway… enough from me. Here’s Vern.
What’s up boys–
A while back I reviewed for you boys a real good canadian teen werewolf picture called GINGER SNAPS PART 1. That was a real smart and original low budget picture for the teenage girls sort of like HEATHERS but with less showoffy dialogue and more werewolves and crap.
Well today I got me a special treat and that was a screener of GINGER SNAPS 2: UNLEASHED. There are alot of part twos coming to the video market this year and it’s very exciting but I guarantee none will be as good as this one. Also I know I had nothing to do with it but still I feel like I should personally apologize for that title. It means nothing! I mean might as well be GINGER SNAPS: RESURRECTION. Or reloaded or full throttle or farewell to the flesh. Or GS2 RETURN OF THE SNAPPING GINGER. That’s just a dumb title. Other than that I got no complaints about this well made sequel. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: werewolves
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 23rd, 2004
Who the fuck knows what to make of Gus Van Sant? Fierce independence and idiosynchricity or whatever for many years. Openly gay independent filmatist working out of Oregon, adapting underground literature and hanging out with Burroughs and shit. Suddenly out of the blue he does this huge hit studio movie with no gay people, but Robin Williams and a math genius garbage man or whatever the fuck that movie was about (I never saw it). How bout them apples I guess is what a guy says in it, I don’t know. So suddenly Van Sant is a mainstream super star and he can do whatever he wants… so what he does, he announces that he’s gonna do a shot for shot remake of Mr. Hitchcock’s famous picture PSYCHO. With the same score and everything. And hire the same screenwriter just to change like ten or fifteen words in it.
Now I know I am against the wheat grain on this one but for me, that was the thing that SOLD me on this Van Sant, not the thing that lost me. Sure, DRUGSTORE COWBOY was a great one and there was some good business in his other pictures, but it was the day he cashed in his mainstream clout to do something THAT fucking ridiculous that made me think this was a guy I could really respect. Nobody else would get the chance to try something like that, nobody else would WANT to try something like that, and anybody, including him, is not likely to get out of that one unscathed. It was a god damn kamikaze mission, or “homicide bombing” as our friends at Fox “news” call it in their unending quest for a new, less accurate form of speaking. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Gus Van Sant
Posted in Crime, Drama, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Sunday, January 18th, 2004
When I saw the first trailer for MYSTIC RIVER I practically flipped out. I guess not like one of those “geek-gasms” my bud Harold Knowles talks about but more like getting goose-shivers or the hair standing up on your balls or whatever the saying is. I already knew it had cleaned up at the Whatsisdick Film Festival over there in wherever it was, and that it was directed by my man Clint, who actually did the narration for this trailer. There was no scenes from the movie, just a helicopter shot of the town with the narration and then the credits start telling me, okay: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney… and then it says, “A Film by Clint Eastwood.” It gives you no clue what it’s about really, just shows you the setting and tells you the players and figures that if that’s not enough for you then you must be an asshole. “That’s all I need to know,” I said, but really I already knew more – that it was written by oscar winner Brian Helgeland, director of outlaw award winner PAYBACK. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Clint Eastwood, Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins
Posted in Crime, Drama, Mystery, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 1st, 2004
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
Here he comes… one of my favorite online reviewers. It’s been too long, so it is a genuine pleasure to re-introduce the one and only Vern…
What’s up boys —
Vern here, still alive and ready to unveil my first “the ain’t it cool news” review for 2004. Unfortunately Seagal’s new picture with Ringo Lam is not done yet so instead I gotta review some movie about Battle Royale 2 by Kinji Fukasaku and son.
Previously on the Ain’t It Cool News: Battle Royale part 1 is a Japanese picture about a near future where school kids are put on an island by the government and forced to kill each other off. The survivor gets to live, so everybody has to decide whether to a) be all ethical and shit or 2) try to survive. It’s a pretty good movie and because it is brutally violent and not american, it has a big cult following here in my country of USA.
Battle Royale part 2 is the highly anticipated sequel, originally directed by Mr. Fukasaku again but he passed away and his son finished the job. It has been reviewed a couple times on here before by people who hated it and said to fuck it and etc. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Kenta Fukasaku, Kinji Fukasaku
Posted in Action, AICN, Drama, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | No Comments »
Friday, November 14th, 2003
Hey folks, Harry here… Vern, being one to only see the arty movies like the ones he mentions below is the perfect choice to review that hero of the Arthouses… I’m of course talking about Steven Seagal and his latest starring success… …ahem… Anyway, lest you get tired of reading about Seagal’s Private Investigator on Drudge-linked stories, now you get the skinny on the top man himself. And if you ever sit down with Seagal for lunch, play the… “How would you kill me” game, where you just continually ask him, once every 4 minutes or so how he would kill you. I hear this is amazingly entertaining as Seagal has an endless variety of ways to kill the annoying fuck sitting across from him. Go on, give it a try!
Vern reviews BELLY OF THE BEAST by Ching Siu-Tung
Boys –
I know you are fans of the hong kong cinema, martial arts, karate, and etc. So I bet you probaly know who Ching Siu-Tung is. Or maybe you know him as Siu-Tung Ching, or Siu-tung Chin, or Tony Tung Yee Ching, or Xiaodong Cheng, or Tony Ching Siu Tung, or just plain Tony Ching. I don’t know, the dude has lots of names. But the point is not what the dude’s name or names is, the point is what the dude does. He may not be as well known in the united states of america as your John Woos or your Yuen Woo Pings or your Tsui Harks. But I bet you’ve seen some of his works before. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ching Siu-Tung, DTV, international co-productions, Seagalogy, Steven Seagal
Posted in Action, AICN, Martial Arts, Reviews, Seagal | 4 Comments »
Thursday, October 16th, 2003
Hey folks, Harry here… Well let’s see… Mr Beaks and I both liked THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but Quint and now Vern didn’t like it… with Vern more or less striking with out and out hatred and venom. This is exactly what will happen to you if you carry the original in the theater with you. So, if you’re expecting the experience of the first film… I suggest renting the first film. If you want to see a “STUDIO VERSION” of this story, then check this film out, but I only suggest going if you’re open to that.
Meanwhile… here ya go, for all you monkeys that have been saying that TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was 100% based on Ed Gein… take a look at this LINK!!! See, we’ve got crazy psycho killers from Travis County!!!
Harold & the boys,
I bet Harry and some of the others out there agree with me that Mr. Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is not only a great horror picture, but one of the all time greats of American independent Cinema. A real hall of famer. Well if so you’ll remember that crazy old drunk in the cemetery at the beginning. “You laugh at an old man.” The kids are asking around about which bodies got dug up and the old man tries to warn them away from this godforsaken shit hole out there in Harryland.
Well today I am that old man leaning up against the tombstone, warning you against the worst type of dumb movie: the kind of dumb movie that is a remake of perfect movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jessica Biel, Marcus Nispel, Michael Bay, remakes, slashers
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Friday, September 12th, 2003
When last we saw the Mariachi, he had killed his drug dealer brother to avenge his lover’s death and the career-ending injury of his hand. He had found a new love (Carolina) and had indirectly caused the shooting of a little boy he had given guitar lessons to. He decided to give up violence, but only a little bit, so he kept his guitar case full of weapons “just in case.”
When we see him again in ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO he has become even more mythical than before. Instead of having to send Steve Buscemi to bars to make up stories about him, the bartenders themselves tell the stories. His hand has healed so he can play guitar better than ever, in fact he likes to just walk around playing guitar even when people are trying to kill him. Robert Rodriguez knows how to make a hand made guitar look like the most beautiful thing in the world, so it’s good that the Mariachi is hiding out in a town of guitar makers who like him to test their creations. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Antonio Banderas, Danny Trejo, Johnny Depp, Mickey Rourke, Robert Rodriguez, Salma Hayek, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Action, Reviews | 2 Comments »
