Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Thursday, March 25th, 2004
Hey folks, Harry here… I’m so envious of Vern… he’s seen STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 – and while I know it was shot for 3 shiny canadian loons, I can’t help but hope it has more pretty people with vacant eyes being torn to shreds by big bugs! I can hope… right? Here he is…
Dear fellas,
As promised back when I reviewed WILD THINGS 2: DARK TERRITORY, I have returned with a review of STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION, a much better straight to video sequel in my opinion. But that’s not saying much. But it’s okay though.
This part 2 is directed by Mr. Phil Tippett, the special effects genius who worked on such other part 2s as STAR WARS part 2, INDIANA JONES part 2, ROBOCOP part 2 and HOUSE part 2. He was also “demon supervisor” on THE GOLDEN CHILD part 1. He has his own studio which did some of the effects in BLADE part 2, in case any of the talkbackers were wondering how I was gonna work that one into this review.
Anyway more importantly Mr. Tippett did the effects for the first STARSHIP TROOPERS and he has also brought back the same writer, Ed “I also did ROBOCOP” Neumeier. So we’ve got some of the same people involved, even if we’re missing the crucial ingredient of Paul Verhoeven, perverted Dutchman. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: DTV, DTV sequels, siege movies
Posted in Action, AICN, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | No Comments »
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hi, everyone. “Moriarty” here with some Rumblings From The Lab…
Next up, we’ve got our friend from Seattle, the one and only Vern…
Boys,
A few months ago I would not think I would be saying this. But I just saw the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, and I did not want to perpetrate violent acts against anybody afterwards. Not the Scooby Doo guy, not the commercial director guy, not anybody. If the Scooby Doo dude would’ve been standing right there when I came out, and there was a clear opening to punch the guy hard in the balls, or toss him through a windshield like Steven Seagal did to that pimp in the opening scene of OUT FOR JUSTICE, I still wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve been like, “It’s cool man, it’s cool.”
That’s high praise. I would not punch the writer of this movie in the balls. Put that on the poster, fuckers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: fast zombies, remakes, Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Zack Snyder, zombies
Posted in AICN, Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, March 10th, 2004
Hey folks, Harry here with Vern… he’s our magical little friend from up in Seattle and he doesn’t like KRULL! What sort of soulless mutherfucker doesn’t dig on KRULL! KRULL is the film that introduced the GLAVE and THE GLAVE is the fucking weapon of choice in my D&D household! And the Spider sequence… the sand in the hand… Ancient bitter love… FIRESTEEDS! Oh absolutely it’s got levels of funk 4 feet deep all about, but I love all sorts of crazy shit in that movie, and would love to see it in 70mm. ENVY! Ok, here’s Vern, who I still like, even if he’s too backwoods to get KRULL!
Boys –
Every once in a while – or once a year, I guess – Seattle’s landmark Cinerama (Cinerama.Com) theater has a film festival where they show a bunch of archival 70mm prints and a couple in actual 3-projector Cinerama. And then a bunch of people watch the movies, etc.
This year some of the films shown include LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, HOW THE WEST WAS WON (in 3-strip Cinerama), THIS IS CINERAMA, OKLAHOMA and IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. I forgot to go to those but I saw GHOSTBUSTERS, TOTAL RECALL and KRULL instead. All in 70mm. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ghostbusters, Liam Neeson, Paul Verhoeven, Peter Yates, Stanley Kubrick
Posted in Action, AICN, Fantasy/Swords, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 7 Comments »
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 »
