SIX-STRING SAMURAI is an artifact from another time – the early internet days, when movie nerds like us were a fringe group beginning to ascend to power, and before people would make fake trailers and put them on Youtube. Specifically it was the fall of 1998, after a strange summer of blockbusters everybody hated (GODZILLA, LOST IN SPACE, THE AVENGERS) but also some classics (BLADE, THE MASK OF ZORRO, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, WILD THINGS, OUT OF SIGHT) — see my overview of the season here. In the middle of all that Palm Pictures released this low budget post-apocalyptic movie about a Buddy Holly lookalike battling his way through the desert to get to “Lost Vegas.” It only played 16 screens, but it lasted 15 weeks. People must’ve been watching it.
I didn’t get a chance until it came to DVD, but I’d been hearing about it for months on The Ain’t It Cool News. In researching it I found an interview with director Lance Mungia where Harry Knowles acknowledged that his “over-the-top” review had raised expectations too high and led many people to be disappointed. And that’s my memory of what the reaction was at the time. I think I liked it more than some, I thought it was pretty cool, but it didn’t change the world. (read the rest of this shit…)
I’m going to continue with my 
GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE is the fifth of the “Monsterverse” movies, and to me the best one. Don’t get me wrong, I kinda liked the attempt at a serious Spielbergian approach in 
The producer I always associate with 
DOWNTIME is a 1997 British film set in a dilapidated apartment building. I feel like somebody might’ve recommended it to me here years ago, but maybe it’s just in my head because the cover says “MOVE OVER BRUCE WILLIS, A BRITISH ACTION MOVIE TO DIE FOR.” I didn’t really think of it as an action movie, but the 
Fairly often I get emails from people who made low budget movies, sometimes they seem to be familiar with me, sometimes they don’t, but they’re trying to do the very hard work of getting people to notice their needle out there in the haystack of what’s available. I sincerely wish every one of them well, but I don’t take very many of them up on it. My fear is that 99.9% of the time it’s not gonna be some hidden gem, or even some crazy failure, it’s just gonna be okay for what it is. And I know I’ll feel bad for them and want to say nice things, but what good does it do them for a niche critic like me to be nice about their movie being okay? I don’t know.
I guess I would classify CATCH THE FAIR ONE (2021) as a thriller more than an action movie, but it’s a certified badass thriller. It’s the first acting role for Kali Reis, the former world champion boxer who recently starred with Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country (her reward for this, I believe). Reis also co-wrote the movie with director Josef Kubota Wladyka.
MOON GARDEN (2022) is a strange little fantasy film from writer/director (and also editor, and sound designer, and production designer, and art director, and visual effects artist, and colorist, and animator) Ryan Stevens Harris. Oscilloscope Laboratories gave it an arthouse theatrical run, and recently put it on blu-ray and DVD, and it’s also on Shudder at the moment, though I wouldn’t really think of it as a horror movie.
After watching 
