Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
Well the Christmas season is upon us and what better way to celebrate Christmas than to put ornaments on a tree and put presents under it? I don’t know but while we ponder that let’s also talk about evil Santa movies.
Silent Night Deadly Night is a mid-level entry in the holiday-themed slasher movie genre. It’s not a classic like Halloween but then again it’s not completely dumb like the Leprechaun pictures or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Massacre which is not a real movie but would probaly be pretty stupid, in my opinion. Unless they got the right director but even then, I don’t know about that premise. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Christmas horror, killer Santa, Linnea Quigley, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
Remember that motherfucker that made Happiness? His name is Todd Solondz and you might think he’s some hipster that came out of nowhere with 1996’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and then hit it big when he was Outlaw enough to refuse to cut Happiness, brought it to a different distributor who would release it unrated or whatever. Well, that’s what I thought but then I found out about this, his first picture from 1989, one year after the release of Die Hard.
And I gotta be honest this movie is a piece of shit. It is only worth watching as a curiosity for fans of the other two Solondz works. What is weird is it has all his themes of loneliness, hopelessness etc. except in the context of a more goofy mainstream comedy. Solondz is actually the star of the picture playing a struggling playwriter named Ira. And this Solondz, I mean to be frankly honest, this guy is what they call a nerd. I mean seriously. He’s a skinny, scraggly haired, overbited weirdo with gigantic glasses, a squeaky, whiny voice and weird affectations. He would be right at home in one of his other movies. But here he is cast as a Woody Allen type stuttering neurotic Writer character. And he is in a functional lifestyle with successful friends, he even goes on dates and gets laid. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Todd Solondz
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
This is a science fiction picture from the Hammer Studios over there in Britain, and you know what that means: I saw it on American Movie Classics. The hero of this story is a dude by the name of Quatermass who apparently stars in a bunch of movies and TV shows over there like Quatermass and the Pit, The Quatermass Experiment etc. No it’s not one of those weird shot on video shows they do marathons of on PBS when they need money. You’re thinking of dr. who and the red dwarf. What the FUCK is up with these college dudes that think that shit is funny? You know how they repeat the jokes in a phoney british accent I hate that man. Anyway I wouldn’t try to pull that shit on you don’t worry this is a whole different thing here, this Quatermass.
Quatermass is a college professor looking dude with the tweed suit and vest, bow tie and beard. He is not an action hero, everything he does is completely with the brains, I mean this guy is a real rocket scientist. And by rocket scientist I mean he is the type of scientist who studies rockets. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Quatermass, Roy Ward Baker
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
A little while back I saw a real good documentary called DERBY which on the surface was about a guy trying to become a professional roller derby artist but really was about how he was cheating on his wife and there was a dude with no shirt on reading playboys, and other weird stuff. I don’t know how to describe it man read that review if that’s what you’re interested in. get off my fuckin back, jack.
Anyway there’s a reason I bring this up, it has to do with this review also. The director of that picture was Robert Kaylor, who according to amazon.com presents the internet movie database only did three other movies, and of those three this here CARNY is the only one in print. So I watched it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Craig Wasson, Gary Busey, Jodie Foster, Robert Kaylor
Posted in Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
As you know I like to watch the classics but the only way to tell for sure if it is a classic is based on what channel it is on. This one was on American Movie Classics so that’s how I know. If it was on TBS or especially USA that would be another story. Anyway it is an old one from James Whale the director of Frankenstein.
Boris Karloff from the Frankenstein gets top billing but let’s be honest here, he’s playing a mute butler for christ’s sake. This is not a starring role it is strictly a gimp role in my opinion. I mean I know for a fact the man can talk, and can talk well. But you wouldn’t know it the way he’s typecasted in some of these pictures. Here he’s just a big oafish brute who gets drunk and tries to grab the pretty ladies. He looks like they left the Frankenstein makeup on him and pasted a beard over it the poor bastard. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, James Whale
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | No Comments »
Monday, December 31st, 2001
First off friends welcome to 2002. Sorry about that 2001 business. Just a couple more of these and Bush’ll be gone, we hope. Auld lang sine, etc. etc.
Anyway, enough holiday theme shit, let’s get to the point here. If I had a most anticipated movie of last Wednesday, it woulda been ALI. Why? Because it’s a movie about Muhammed Fucking Ali. To my knowledge it is the ONLY movie playing in theaters right now that is about Muhammed Fucking Ali.
I didn’t know what to expect from this movie though, on account of the casting. The real Muhammed Ali already played himself in the movie THE GREATEST and in the documentary WHEN WE WERE KINGS. And why fix what ain’t fucked? I didn’t understand this new casting of Will Smith in the part. I gotta admit I was pretty pissed, like the nerds get whenever they cast somebody new as Superman, James Bond, Dr. Zauis or Green Aqua.
And that’s what Ali is, is a super hero. Not the kind who wears a cape, although I must admit he does wear boots. Anyway I think we all agree that Muhammed Ali is one of the greatest american heroes there is. You don’t even have to like sports – and I don’t – to understand that Ali is what the kids call “the mothafuckin MAN.” They don’t make ’em like Ali anymore. In fact they never did. It was probaly some typa mistake on the assembly line. Some freak accident that only happens once or twice every thousand-thousand years. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Michael Mann, Muhammad Ali, Will Smith
Posted in Drama, Reviews, Sport, Vern Tells It Like It Is | 8 Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2001
Well in late December as I was preparing to face down the ol’ Y2K problem I got to thinking about the old Mad Max and Road Warrior movies I used to like so much, and that got me thinking about Mel Gibson, the young Australian actor who played Mad Max.
Well okay, I admit that Mel hasn’t amounted to as much as we as a society thought he would back in those days, but that doesn’t mean you can Write the man off entirely. I know what you are thinking, this dude hasn’t done shit since Mad Max so just forget about him. But sometimes even after he’s considered washed up by the general public an actor or actress is still putting out high quality type performances with little recognition. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Duke, Brian Helgeland, Gregg Henry, James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Lucy Liu, Maria Bello, Mel Gibson, Parker, Paul Abascal, Richard Stark
Posted in Action, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 4 Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2001
This is the story of some magical midgets called the hobbits (sort of like the smurfs except caucasian instead of blue). What they do is, one of them inherits a powerful magic ring created by an evil individual from the past. If this took place in america in 2001, the hobbits would just go ahead and use the ring, and everybody would be all for it. It might not even make the headlines, it might be buried on page 11 like the story I read yesterday about how the Bush regime is already developing “small” nuclear weapons to use in the caves in Afghanistan.
But this is Hobbitland or whatever so they do the right thing, they take the weapon, they REFUSE to use it because they know it corrupts them, and they travel toward the Mountain of Doom, the only place it can be destroyed. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, Peter Jackson, Viggo Mortensen
Posted in Action, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Saturday, December 15th, 2001
Vanilla Sky is an american remake of OPEN YOUR EYES, the second picture by the young spanish gentleman Alejandro Amenabar, who also did THESIS and THE OTHERS. After the movie I was saying to a gal that the ending was kinda different on the original, and the guy next to me was saying the same thing to his friend. Except he was just getting out of OCEAN’S 11.
Everything is fucking remakes now, huh? The above took place in Seattle, Washington, where as we speak the Dreamworks company is hard at work on an unneccesary remake of (the) RING. History has not been kind to american remakes of foreign pictures. Even when you get the same guy to remake it – like with THE VANISHING or NIGHTWATCH – the movie will piss everybody off and the director will be forgotten forever. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Cameron Crowe, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, remakes, Tom Cruise
Posted in Mystery, Reviews, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Thriller | 5 Comments »
Friday, December 7th, 2001
When you get two Oscar nominations for best director in the same year (for Erin Brockovich and Traffic) and you’re at the commercial peak of your career, what do you do for a followup?
I think Steven Soderbergh has the right answer. Two Oscar nominations is nothing to commit suicide over. Sure it’s embarassing, but it’s not the end of the world. After all it was only one year earlier that his picture The Limey won Best Picture, Musical Comedy or Badass in the 1999 Outlaw Awards, and that magic could not be entirely faded. So Soderbergh packed up the political pretensions, left them out on the porch in a box marked for the retard center, and went and made a casino heist movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Steve Soderbergh
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
