COLD PREY 2 picks up right after part 1 at a nearby hospital that’s in the process of being shut down. If more of the crazy mountain man’s victims had gotten away with injuries instead of getting tossed into the crevasse then I’m sure business would’ve been booming. But no, he’s too god at what he does, leaving these poor doctors and nurses without much to do except sit around using the internet to look up how to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
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Cold Prey 2 (Fritt Vilt II)
Guess who’s in comics books? (answer: em) (hold up to mirror for answer)
The internet belongs to the nerds. Or to the geeks, I forget which one. I always get alot of grief for getting the lingo wrong, I mix up “nerd” with “geek” and I say “comic strips” instead of “illustrated graphic novels for grown adults” and I say “Ziggy” instead of “Tom Wilson’s Ziggy.” I’m either confused or sometimes just jokin around but I mean no harm and people still get upset. Especially if I do it on The Ain’t It Cool News everybody acts like I yelled out the n-word or something. I would write several paragraphs of detailed and thoughtful analysis laying out a series of arguments and backing them up with examples but if I chose “comic strip” instead of “comic book” to describe a stapled together pamphlet of non-comical drawings then that would be all they would respond to and declare my input invalid.
And I used to try to be polite and apologize to these people but no more, because now I AM IN A FUCKING COMIC STRIP. Or at least between some of them. My cool British publisher Titan is publishing a comics magazine called “CLiNT,” and I have a column in it starting with issue #3. So if you want to read “Nemesis Chapter 2” and “Mahatma Gandhi presents Space Oddities” you will have no choice but to flip past the words that I wrote. WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS? (read the rest of this shit…)
Cold Prey (Fritt Vilt)
The last couple Octobers I was on the hunt for undiscovered slasher gems. I would go through the video store where they keep all the slasher type business, looking for ones I never noticed or never bothered to pay attention to, especially VHS since if it’s not on DVD yet it’s gonna be pretty obscure. This led to some really shitty ones and a few minor discoveries. Last year I also learned to look in the murder mysteries, it turned out there were a few good ones like EYES OF A STRANGER that cross over into that territory.
This year I hit gold right at the start (yeah, I know – ’cause you guys drew me a map). After that there was no pressure so I got some non-slasher ones and dipped into some of the horror sections I usually don’t look at. But while browsing the Euro-Horror I spotted this 2006 Norwegian slasher movie. It drew my attention by being next to its part 2, so that seemed like the type of shit I might like. You know how I am, I’m a sucker for the legitimizing power of the series.
True Legend
This year’s TRUE LEGEND is Yuen Woo-Ping’s first directational work since IRON MONKEY 2 in 1996. During that break he’s done some classic fight choreography, including some of the best ever in American movies (the MATRIXes, the KILL BILLs), but just hasn’t put himself in charge of a whole movie. So this is fun because it’s great wushu mythmaking and the master’s trademark fights working with a new pack of stylistic and technological weapons that didn’t exist 14 years ago. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Karate Kid (2010 remake)
“Dad, I’m bored. Can I do another movie? Can we do PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS 2 or something?”
“Of course not, Jaden. You know we don’t do sequels in this family. Except for the Matrix.”
“That’s not true, dad. You did Men in Black 2 and Bad Boys 2 and you might do Independence Day 2.”
“Exactly! Y’knowhumseen? Ha ha ha!” (charming smile)
“Well, maybe you can get me in a remake. Mr. Bay does remakes all the time.”
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Holy shit, ROLLING THUNDER finally hits DVD!
Has everybody here seen ROLLING THUNDER? Written by Paul TAXI DRIVER Schrader, directed by John OUT FOR JUSTICE Flynn, starring William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones, this is one of the hall of fame badass revenge movies, a must-see classic. Yet it’s never been legitimately released on DVD, and fairly hard to come by on VHS. When it played in a small theater in Seattle a few years back the only known print had to be borrowed from Quentin Tarantino’s collection, and I hear it was not in good shape. Tarantino loved the movie so much he named his short-lived theatrical re-release label after it, and yet even he didn’t get it a re-release. So I always figured there was some weird deal with the rights, or an ancient Egyptian curse of some kind. At one point I even got a chance to ask John Flynn’s daughter if she knew why it hadn’t been released, and she had no idea. (She says he was a great dad and a real cool guy, by the way.)
The Girl Who Played With Fire
After THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO I was real excited to see what would happen in the next installment. The second one starts with a flashback to the Netherlands in the 17th century. Scarlett Johansson plays a maid who goes to work for the famed painter Vermeer (Colin Firth). He finds out she’s interested in art so he starts teaching her how to mix paints. I really wasn’t sure what this had to do with Lisbeth Salander and I was kind of bored so I turned off THE GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING and skipped to THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE.
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Vern’s Underrated Horror A-Z
More horror movie recommendations than you can shake an ax at
This one cool movie criticism type blog (short for web log) called ‘Rupert Pupkin Speaks’ started a thing of everybody doing their lists of top ten underrated horror movies. They got HOWLING director Joe Dante, Alamo Drafthouse guy Zack Carlson, and Ain’t It Cool’s Mr. Beaks in on the action, among a whole bunch of others. Everybody’s doing it. So I got jealous and tried to outdo them with not a top ten list, but an entire ENGLISH LANGUAGE ALPHABET of underrated horror. Let’s see if I can do it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Alone in the Dark
ALONE IN THE DARK is the story of a bunch of people together in the dark. It’s a siege movie, but it starts out like THE NINTH CONFIGURATION or other movies where a guy comes in to take over as the new doctor at a mental hospital, and he meets all the colorful characters and what not. For example New Line Cinema’s mascot Lynn Shaye plays the receptionist who turns out to be a patient.
Dwight Schultz, aka Howling Mad Murdoch, the mentally ill member of the A-Team, gets to play the doctor in this one. It would be cool if Mr. T showed up as a vegan helicopter pilot, or George Peppard as a spacey hippie who absolutely hates it when a plan comes together. Instead they have ex-military Jack Palance and preacher/arsonist Martin Landau as two of the guys on the third floor. These are the patients one hospital employee describes as “very, very intense.” They also got a huge fat child molester (Erland van Lidth, Dynamo from THE RUNNING MAN) and a notion that Dwight Schultz killed the old doctor and they gotta get revenge. They wait for a window of opportunity, and it opens up pretty quick when there’s a power outage and they’re able to get out, Michael Meyers style. (read the rest of this shit…)