"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Manborg

As a fan of writer/director Steven Kostanski’s last three movies, PSYCHO GOREMAN, FRANKIE FREAKO and DEATHSTALKER, I decided it was time to check out one of his older works. MANBORG is his first feature, released in 2011. He had already done several shorts (best title: Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove) while working in the makeup departments of larger productions including CAPOTE and TAMARA.

I would say MANBORG is a tongue-in-cheek movie played with a slightly straighter face than the other three Kostanskis I’ve seen, or at least with fewer straight up jokes. So it’s maybe his purest example of what I think of as a movie in quotes – a feature film that plays more like it’s saying “wouldn’t it be funny if there was a movie like this?” than like it actually is that movie. To enjoy it is to play along and pretend that it is. (And I did enjoy it.) (read the rest of this shit…)

March 10th, 2026 | 7 Comments »

Protector

Last week when I went to see BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS: WIND RISES IN THE DESERT I saw some exciting trailers, including one for a kidnapped daughter action vehicle starring the great Milla Jovovich (THE THREE MUSKETEERS). And it was coming out this week. January came late this year, fellas! I hope this doesn’t mean Milla wants to abdicate her crown as the queen of digital FX horror/fantasy action movie bullshit (RESIDENT EVIL, ULTRAVIOLET, HELLBOY 2019, MONSTER HUNTER, IN THE LOST LANDS, etc.), but I was excited to see her in a straight ahead TAKEN type deal. So you bet I was at the 12:10 pm Friday matinee of PROTECTOR.

The director is Adrian Grünberg (GET THE GRINGO). Fortunately it doesn’t have all the problems of his movie RAMBO: LAST BLOOD, but it has a similar brain-fried-by-Facebook world view. An even-more-heavy-handed-than-the-rest-of-the-movie intro tells us that while American soldiers were being sent overseas a war was being fought at home against human trafficking. I’m not sure who or what that refers to though because our story is about one of the people who is overseas who will later begin a one-woman war against said criminal activity. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 9th, 2026 | 12 Comments »

Kick or Die

There is a movie that was released by American International Pictures in 1987 that’s still only available on VHS, and the name of the movie is KICK OR DIE. If you need any more information than that, please enjoy this review.

KICK OR DIE is a particular type of ‘80s b-movie that I have a soft spot for because it’s very serious but has a deranged view of human behavior, and every once in a while the drum machine and the synthesizers kick in and people start fighting. It’s far from the best of this sort, but it’s novel because it lumps together a couple different popular movie types of the era that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to overlap: 1) night stalker whodunit 2) karate movie 3) lady trying to make it as a singer.

That first one might understandably keep some people from watching it. A serial rapist has been attacking women on a college campus. The scenes of the attacks are over quick, but obviously unpleasant to sit through. In the daylight the campus is swarmed with media and protesters as the board of directors or whatever meet about what to do. The football coach says “I say we hire a karate expert to come and teach the girls how to kick his god damn balls in!” (read the rest of this shit…)

March 4th, 2026 | 11 Comments »

Trancers II: The Return of Jack Deth

TRANCERS II: THE RETURN OF JACK DETH is a DTV sequel that came out in 1991, six years after the original TRANCERS, and four years after the at-that-time-unreleased anthology short TRANCERS: CITY OF LOST ANGELS. The cop from the future was now starting to be a relic of the past, like he’d always dreamed.

A new screenwriter, Jackson Barr (BODY CHEMISTRY, SUBSPECIES, ROBOT WARS, MANDROID) joins director Charles Band (PARASITE), but otherwise everybody is back. Tim Thomerson (between an episode of The Flash and an episode of Baywatch) is Jack Deth, the time traveling future cop now well established as an old-timey private eye in 1991 Los Angeles. Despite the subtitle he’s not returning from anywhere, he’s just sticking around in the same place. (And he beat BATMAN RETURNS to it by a year.) He’s married to Lena (Helen Hunt, a year before starting Mad About You) and they live in a mansion with Hap Ashby (Biff Manard, DESERT KICKBOXER), the former MLB player they saved from homelessness. In the intervening years Hap “made a pile of money” on “commodities speculation” and now collects firetrucks (?!).

The biggest tension in Jack and Lena’s relationship is that Lena wants them to buy their own house to settle down and have a kid in. Gone are her punk rock days. She wears bland ‘90s jeans and has regular-colored hair. She looks like Helen Hunt, actually. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 3rd, 2026 | 4 Comments »

Blades of the Guardians

BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS is the new movie that’s gonna make me even more confused when I’m trying to remember which OF THE GUARDIANS movie is the owl one and which is the Jack Frost/Easter Bunny one. But I’m willing to face that challenge in exchange for a new movie directed by the now 80-year-old legend of martial arts choreography Yuen Woo-ping. (Holy shit, MASTER Z: THE IP MAN LEGACY was almost 8 years ago?)

(Note: the full on screen title is BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS: WIND RISES IN THE DESERT. Man, I love movies!)

Wu Jing (LEGENDARY ASSASSIN, KILL ZONE 2, WOLF WARRIOR 2) stars as Dao Ma, a bounty hunter and bodyguard for hire who’s also the second most wanted fugitive in the empire. I actually didn’t recognize him for a second because he has long hair and looks a little older and smaller than I think of him as. In a good way, though. He kinda looks like Vampire Hunter D with his all black outfit and wide brimmed hat. He travels with his young nephew Xiao Qi, but it’s not like LONE WOLF AND CUB because he tries to cover the kid’s eyes when there’s violence. (read the rest of this shit…)

March 2nd, 2026 | 5 Comments »

Your Monster

YOUR MONSTER is a 2024 romantic comedy with a fantastical genre concept. Laura (Melissa Barrera, ABIGAIL) is a theater actor who gets dumped by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan, CIVIL WAR) while she’s in the hospital getting cancer treatments. She lived with him, so when she gets discharged she goes to stay at her wealthy but absent mother’s house to try to put herself back together. But she doesn’t really get around to that. She mostly eats pies that her mom sends and cries so much that she starts getting regular Kleenex shipments from Amazon.

Then one day she’s startled by a monster (Tommy Dewey, STEP UP REVOLUTION) in the closet. He’s not that fancy of a monster, just kinda like Ron Perlman’s Beast on Beauty and the Beast – gnarly brow, lion-like nose, long hair and beard, hairy hands. He is a monster, but he wears t-shirts and just talks like a dude. When she wakes up from fainting he’s kinda offended she doesn’t remember him. He reminds her she saw him under her bed when she was a kid. And he chased off some dork who tried to kiss her and tried to shame her for not wanting to. I think she remembers.

Anyway, he says the house is his now and she needs to get the fuck out. She cries for a while, so he gives her two weeks. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 27th, 2026 | 3 Comments »

The Secret Agent (2025)

THE SECRET AGENT (O Agente Secreto) is the last 2025 best picture nominee I hadn’t seen, but I was gonna see it anyway. By coincidence I had just caught up with writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2019 film BACURAU (which he co-directed with Juliano Dornelles) right when this came out here. THE SECRET AGENT is slightly more normal, but still very distinct, and a leap forward in terms of filmmaking prowess. As far as Oscars it’s a surprising choice because it’s in Portuguese and it’s odd and puzzling and and takes its sweet time letting you know what it’s about. But also it kinda makes sense because it’s unique and great and though it’s about Brazil in 1977 it has many echoes of things going on right now over here and elsewhere.

Last year also had a Brazilian best picture nominee – I’M STILL HERE – a haunting story about how people tried to go on living while authoritarianism and corruption were corroding their society in the ‘70s. This tackles overlapping material in a completely different way, a little more comparable to my favorite movie of the year, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. It’s serious and tragic but also very funny and satirical, a realistic world peppered with the surreal, the absurd, the arguably exaggerated that’s somehow truer than if it wasn’t. And it’s that rare pleasure of a movie where I truly have no idea what it’s going to be about or sense of where it’s going but I stay enraptured. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 26th, 2026 | 7 Comments »

Goku Midnight Eye / Goku Midnight Eye II

I don’t identify as an anime fan. Not because I’d be ashamed to, but because I don’t want to steal that valor. Real anime fans contain volumes of cultural knowledge that I lack. I don’t think I’m a tourist, but maybe a vacationer. At most a dabbler, a casual partaker, an occasional appreciator. But I love the artform of animation, so some of that stuff hits the spot.

Recently I made the connection that a bunch of the ones I’d enjoyed were directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri: WICKED CITY, NINJA SCROLL, VAMPIRE HUNTER D: BLOODLUST, THE ANIMATRIX and HIGHLANDER: THE SEARCH FOR VENGEANCE. (I also reviewed AZUMI 2: DEATH OR LOVE, a live action movie he wrote.) I like his outlandish characters, his wildly exaggerated violence, and his general approach of style and energy taking precedence over all else. So I remembered the name when I came across a blu-ray called GOKU MIDNIGHT EYE. It’s directed by Kawajiri and written by/based on a manga by Buichi Terasawa, who created another one I really dug called SPACE ADVENTURE COBRA. I’m glad I paid attention, because this is a really good one. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 25th, 2026 | 7 Comments »

Rumpelstiltskin (1996)

The idea of a horror movie called RUMPELSTILTSKIN seemed funny enough to me in the 1990s that I got a poster for it in the free bin at the video store (“1996 THEATRICAL RELEASE!” it exclaimed) and hung it on my wall, but not enough that it ever occurred to me to actually watch it. Then a couple years ago the eccentrically curated label Terror Vision put out a fancy 4K/blu-ray special edition, and I thought, “Could it actually be good?”

Well, that depends on how you define “actually good.” I’d say I got more out of JACK FROST, which had almost the same trajectory for me. But RUMPELSTILTSKIN is one of those movies, scarcer and arguably more charming now, that take an absurd horror concept and go to town with it, knowingly silly and with some jokes but with at least a main character who treats it with complete sincerity. At the time it was easy to hate, but now it’s easier to at least get a smile out of it. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 23rd, 2026 | 5 Comments »

40 Acres

40 ACRES is a 2024 post-apocalyptic movie, set 12 years after a fungal infection killed all the animals, causing civilization to collapse. It centers on Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler, THE HARDER THEY FALL) and her family, who grow corn and weed on their farm, which they protect fiercely and skillfully. In the opening some raiders show up (mostly white, mostly rednecks), maybe thinking the Freemans will be pushovers, but at first they can’t even find them. They just hear them whistling. Next thing they know they’re being shot and sliced and chased through the corn field. When it’s over we see that even the Freeman kids were part of the battle, and they’re very proud of their headshots.

We notice some trepidation from big brother Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor, TIME CUT), though. He unmasks the last one he shot and is clearly bothered that it was a young woman. Then she turns out to be alive and he hesitates to finish the job. But his mom orders him to, so he does it. (read the rest of this shit…)

February 19th, 2026 | 5 Comments »

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