"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Up Tight

You guys know who Booker T and the MGs are, right? The amazing instrumental R&B group, centered around soulful organist Booker T. Jones, with a group of super-tight studio musicians including Blues Brothers Steve Cropper and (in a later lineup) Donald “Duck” Dunn. They were the house band for Stax Records, so not only did they have all their great albums but you can hear them backing up Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and others.

If you know them you might also know this song, “Time Is Tight”:

Recognize that? Their somewhat similar song “Green Onions” is used in way more movies, but “Time Is Tight” is in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, so you’ve at least heard it in there.

One thing I didn’t know until a couple years ago is that this song was originally composed as part of the score for a 1968 movie called UP TIGHT, directed by Jules Dassin (RIFIFI). I found the soundtrack on vinyl, but at that time the movie had never been on video. It finally came out a couple weeks ago so I checked it out.

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October 23rd, 2012 | 15 Comments »

Video Violence

You know, I got buddies who are really into the shot-on-video horror movies of the ’80s. Some of them, like SLEDGE HAMMER for example, have been getting loving re-releases lately (with limited edition VHS version, even). Personally, at least where I am in my journey as a man and spiritual being at this point, I draw the line at shot on video. If I rent one on accident I turn it off immediately, wrap it in 3 plastic bags and bring it back. I watch a z-grade movie like BLOOD MASSACRE shot on actual film and I think if these motherfuckers could get it together to achieve that minimum level of professionalism then there’s no excuse. Yeah, money, but maybe that’s a helpful type of elitism, a firewall put in place to protect us.

But I knew VIDEO VIOLENCE had a video store prominently featured, and I thought Fangoria did a nice retrospective on it a few months ago, and also I forgot it was shot on video until I put it in. And I decided to give it a chance.

(It turns out the Fangoria article I was thinking of was THE VIDEO DEAD, an early DTV zombie movie.)
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October 20th, 2012 | 65 Comments »

Blood Massacre

Saturday is Video Store Day, the holiday where if children are good and put a dead fish in the slot of a Redbox then in the morning they find rare VHS and import Blu-Rays under their pillows. And we adults visit our local independent video stores or write cranky essays.

I know most of you live in a futuristic world of satellites and lasers and vending machines in the 7-11 parking lot, but as you know if you read that column from last year the remaining video stores are very important to my lifestyle and the type of movies I review here. It seems like soon we old timers will not be enough to support this industry and we’ll be forced to lick the boot of the corporate monopoly, or to start reading more books, until they stop making those too. But until that day I want to honor and support what I still feel is a superior way to find, share and learn about movies. So hooray Video Store Day. If you still have a video store in your area and haven’t been there in a while, maybe stop by.
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October 20th, 2012 | 25 Comments »

Raw Meat

All I knew was RAW MEAT was some kind of a cannibal-in-the-subway movie from Gary Sherman, director of VICE SQUAD and POLTERGEIST III. I heard it was good, meant to see it for a long time, finally did.

During the opening credits – an artful, colorful montage of an upper class gentleman walking through strip club neon, set to some crazy jazz – I learned that it’s from 1972. I expected later. This is pre-TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. I don’t know about this. Is this modern enough to be a good cannibal movie?
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October 19th, 2012 | 10 Comments »

Fade to Black (not the Jay-Z one)

I actually rented FADE TO BLACK as part of Slasher Search, knowing it wasn’t really gonna fit the FRIDAY THE 13TH slasher formula but thinking it might still count. There is a killer in it but he mostly shoots people and really doesn’t do anything that could be considered a slash at all so I’m gonna leave the logo off here.

This is kind of a horror movie but also a pretty detailed and sympathetic portrait of its weirdo killer Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher, CHARIOTS OF FIRE). He’s an awkward, movie obsessed nerd, old enough to be on his own but living with the disabled lady (Eve Brent) who raised him (and yells at him because she blames him for the accident that paralyzed her, even though he was 4 at the time).
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October 18th, 2012 | 10 Comments »

The Mutilator

THE MUTILATOR is a pretty good one about a guy mutilating other guys and their girlfriends. That is why he is called the mutilator, I believe. Well, nobody calls him the mutilator in the movie but out here in the real world we call him the mutilator on account of that is the name of the movie. It’s hard to explain but I think some of you get it. The Mutilator.
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October 17th, 2012 | 31 Comments »

Bereavement

I don’t know anybody that’s heard of MALEVOLENCE, so it’s weird that it has a prequel. Same writer-director (Stevan Mena), similar pretentious title, totally different feel, way better in pretty much every conceivable category. It looks great, the acting is good, the characters are way more likable, the mood and atmosphere are stronger. The mostly unoriginal content is elevated by strong filmatism and confident pacing that tells you to be more concerned about the characters than the screaming and blood.
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October 16th, 2012 | 17 Comments »

Malevolence

This MALEVOLENCE is from 2003, not my preferred era of slasher picture, but it was recommended to me by a weirdo, I’d never heard of it before and I didn’t know anything about it. Seemed like a decent lead. Turns out it’s a low budget horror thing but it mixes in a little bit of a true crime influence. It starts out with a kid being kidnapped in 1989, bringing back memories of all those gloomy based-on-a-true-story-if-you-have-seen-a-missing-kid-call-this-1-800-number TV movies from the ’80s. I thought oh shit, did some motherfucker convince me to rent a movie about kids getting tied up in a shed? But then it quickly switches it up and skips ahead ten years.

Some guys are robbing a bank, and their rendezvous point afterwards is an isolated, abandoned house… which they don’t know is by the abandoned slaughterhouse where that kidnapper took that kid in the prologue. And this is just one possibility I’m offering to you here, but maybe there is still a psycho wandering around that area that those guys might run into? Could be. Nobody knows. Could go either way. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 12th, 2012 | 7 Comments »

Star Time

There’s a pride that comes with renting a movie that I never heard of, that you never heard of, that nobody ever recommended to me before, and finding out it’s something interesting. Man, this one is not what I expected. I’m not saying I discovered an unheralded classic like I did when I stumbled across that Billy Dee Williams movie HIT! when it was only on VHS, but I definitely found an unusual one here.

And it’s all because of Slasher Search. As most of you know, every October I try to find some good slasher movies (preferably from the ’70s or ’80s, but I’m having to get lenient these days) that I’ve never seen before. Every year it gets harder, because the pool gets smaller, and I gotta look for more and more obscure ones, like the ones that haven’t even made it to DVD yet. In this case I got real desperate and ventured out of the horror section and I found this tape in Murder/Mystery/Suspense. It looked like it might be a slasher movie, seeing as how it showed a dude wearing a plastic baby mask holding an ax. Which can be used for slashing, is my contention. (read the rest of this shit…)

October 11th, 2012 | 9 Comments »

Hellbound

“Either this guy is nuttier than a Snickers, or there is some real heavy shit goin down.”

I’ve had this idea for years that one Halloween I should try to honor my two most covered genres by trying to review a bunch of action/horror crossovers. I knew Chuck Norris had done one, so HELLBOUND was at the top of my list. Unfortunately if this is any indication this is not gonna be one of my more worthwhile expeditions.

Our story begins in 1186 AD when Richard the Lionheart (David Robb, who in my opinion was cast in Downton Abbey based entirely on having this one his resume) battles an evil sorcerer called Prosatanos (Christopher Neame, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, SUBURBAN COMMANDO) and locks him in a tomb using magic daggers. Then it continues in 1951 when some bandits who might’ve been professional acquaintances of Indiana Jones discover the tomb and think it would be a good idea to steal the magic daggers, releasing a force of pure evil that will, you know, cause trouble in 40-some years after he gets all the broken pieces of his shattered Magic Scepter Thing of Evil. Now he wants to conquer the world and presumably plunge it into that “1,000 Years of Darkness” Chuck Norris’s wife warned about in their anti-Obama video.
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October 10th, 2012 | 28 Comments »

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