Man, anybody notice they do alot of remakes these days? Seems like it anyway. I’d have to research it a little more to be sure. This is the remake of Larry Cohen’s 1974 killer baby picture. I thought it was supposed to play in theaters, but that’s because I didn’t know it was from the DTV kings at Millennium Pictures and Josef Rusnak, director of ART OF WAR II: BETRAYAL and THE CONTRACTOR. This one unfortunately doesn’t star Wesley Snipes, but instead Bijou Phillips as the mother of the killer baby.In this version she’s a graduate student under some pressure to not have the baby so that she doesn’t screw up her education and throw away a career she’s been working toward. But she makes the decision to leave school to give birth and live with her boyfriend and the disabled younger brother he’s raising. The baby grows unusually fast so she has to have a forced birth. (read the rest of this shit…)
Vern reviews ITS ALIVE remake film!!!
The Howling III: The Marsupials
I always liked THE HOWLING but since the sequels are made by different people and have a reputation for poor quality I never thought to watch them. Then I watched NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD, that documentary about Australian exploitation movies, and saw the clips from THE HOWLING III: THE MARSUPIALS by Australian director Phillipe Mora. It looked like a crazy fever dream full of low-budget-but-really-cool werewolf transformations, some of them looking straight-up cartoonish. Plus they showed how the werewolves have pouches in this one, and gave away the most memorable scene – I’ll get to that later. I figured just from what I saw there was no way this wasn’t worth watching. And I figured right. (read the rest of this shit…)
coming March 30th
Hey, check out this book they got coming out. Sounds like it will be some sort of a collection of movie reviews and essays and what not. I don’t know about you but I will probaly order 100 copies, like most cool people will.
The Unborn
“From one of the writers of THE DARK KNIGHT” is David S. Goyer’s credit these days, but to me he’s still the guy who wrote the BLADE movies. Sure, he fumbled the ball as director of part 3, but it’s not as bad as everybody makes it out to be and definitely not bad enough to cancel his previous accomplishments. The first two BLADE movies are perfect badass storytelling. And he helped with those Batman movies, and with DARK CITY. I liked his BLADE tv show. I even liked his cheesy NICKY FURY tv movie starring David Hasselhoff. So I expect more good things out of him. I think he’s gonna do some good shit.
Hey, how about a PG-13 possession movie from Michael Bay’s remake outfit Platinum Dunes? What better way to show he means business? Hooray! (read the rest of this shit…)
Public Enemies
Johnny Depp as John Dillinger is not a bad idea. He’s a charismatic guy, he projects intelligence and mischief. You believe he could pull off those robberies, charm the press and have the cops pulling out their hair. And Christian Bale makes sense as Purvis, the guy tough enough to take him out but who will spend most of the movie failing and fuming.
Michael Mann delivers a more mainstream, less brooding and macho movie than usual, so most people will like it better than MIAMI VICE (but not me). He still uses that style he’s been fond of lately, lots of handheld shots, all shot digitally, kind of a strange choice for a period piece like this, but not too distracting (or revolutionary, either).
It has some real good gunfights. Not the choreographed sort of way that I usually like but more like MIAMI VICE, chaotic in-the-thick-of it kind of scenes, like you’re an embedded reporter, hearing different gun sounds in all directions. Sometimes one whisks past you or hits a wall near you but luckily you survive. It has some tense scenes, a couple chuckles, the actors are all pretty good. There are lots of little surprise appearances to keep you on your toes (Lili Taylor, Stephen Dorff, Giovanni Ribisi, random Leelee Sobieski cameo). I didn’t even realize that was Bill Crudup playing J. Edgar Hoover. Good job Billy. The movie is fine. (read the rest of this shit…)
Knowing
I’m not sure I can say KNOWING is that good of a movie, but I do think it’s kind of crazy and subversive for a PG-13 high concept Nic Cage Hollywood sci-fi thriller. So the more I think about it the more I kind of like it.
Nic Cage plays so-and-so, college professor, scientist, single dad, widower. His son (not one of the better child actors, poor kid) is attending his school’s 50th anniversary celebration when they dig up a time capsule. They pass out the 50 year old childen’s drawings predicting the future and this kid only gets a creepy paper covered in numbers. That night Nic happens to look at it and notices some of the numbers are 9-11-01. He Googles 9-11-01 (I guess he doesn’t know you’re supposed to “never forget”) and finds out the death toll, which is also right there on the paper. Then, in a montage of drunken code-breaking, he stays up all night doing web research and figures out that the entire paper exactly predicts the dates all the biggest disasters of the past 50 years in order and how many people died in each. And there are more numbers that haven’t happened yet. And one’s coming up in a couple days. Oh shit. (read the rest of this shit…)
Not Quite Hollywood + Hurricane Smith
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD is a pretty good documentary with a really good subject: the history of exploitation movies in Australia. Of course, this is a talking heads and film clips movie, that’s about the only way they could do it. And it tries to cover a broad range of movies over many years, so it doesn’t get real deep into anything. It’s more like a real good TV special than a great movie. It’s a primer, an overview, a sampler to get you started. It gives you a taste of a whole bunch of strange movies you might not have heard of before, points you in some interesting directions, tells you a few good stories. And for that sort of thing it’s very good. (read the rest of this shit…)
Reader plug: Murder Loves Killers Too
This is not an official review, but I wanted to give some attention to a low budget independent slasher movie called MURDER LOVES KILLERS TOO which just hit DVD and was written and directed by one of my readers, Drew Barnhardt.
Every once in a while somebody sends me their no-budget movie and I’m afraid to watch it because I know they put their blood sweat and tears into it and I don’t want to have to tell them “yeah, sure, I watched it… yeah, good effort, I liked the, uh, some of the lighting was very professional” or whatever. So I had this thing sitting around for months and forgot about it and then for some reason I decided to put it in.
To my surprise MURDER LOVES KILLERS TOO is a very solid (if somewhat home made) slasher movie that’s just to my taste because it follows traditional slasher formulas and gets the mechanics right (tense chases and cat and mouse moments) but has a very weird and darkly humorous but not postmodern twist. There’s some funny shit, some cool DePalmian camerawork and I am told this is the first ever slasher movie with a reference to BARRY LYNDON. There’s not a huge amount of gore and it’s obviously the work of people with no money, but I had a fun time and hope I get to see Drew make a movie with a bit of a budget, because he seems to have the right idea. He told me he had that idea many people have after watching crappy DTV horror movies that he could do something better, but unlike most of us he then went out and did it.
My apologies to other readers whose works I meant to plug and didn’t, but I really want this one to succeed because he told me the idea he has for his next movie and it’s right exactly down the center of my alley.
Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
Okay, first off, this is not a fair review. I didn’t go into this thing in good faith. I never thought there was a possibility I would genuinely like this movie. So don’t think I’m trying to be objective here. But I’ve been getting emails and comments for months asking me to review this sequel to a movie I hated, and there’s a hell of a conversation going on in the comments for my review of the first one. And to be honest I was strangely excited to see it. It just sounded so insane, and as a fan and scholar of the summer blockbuster movie maybe it was important that I see it, just like I saw MY GIANT for the sake of Seagalogy. Whatever my excuse is, the same guy who got me into the first one for free hooked me up for this one too. So your wish is my command. (read the rest of this shit…)
Michael Jackson
It’s not like there’s anything new that needs to be pointed out about Michael Jackson, but I can’t think about anything else. Over the years I’ve spun off on many tangents about his talent, his fascinating persona and the tragic circumstances of his life, so it’s nothing really new except for the unhappy ending, the lid put on my dreams of what could happen next. But maybe putting it into words again will help me accept that this has really happened. (read the rest of this shit…)
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