Well I’ve been wanting to say something about this whole Abu Ghraib “prison abuse” (torture) scandal for a while, but what exactly can you say that is not obvious or that has not already been said by some other asshole? Well, hopefully I’ll come up with a few things.
First off, let’s get this out of the way: NO FUCKING WAY is this just the work of six or seven numbnuts soldiers. Yes, those people are scumbags who clearly enjoyed what they were doing and should go to (regular) jail for following unlawful orders. But I’m sorry, I’m not a fucking retard, I’m not buying this bullshit. No bottom of the totem pole grunt is going to be stacking up naked prisoners, raping people with glowsticks, setting dogs on people, attaching wires to people’s dicks AND posing for hilarious novelty photos next to the victim, if they are worried they might be found out. These people were comfortable. There were apparently intelligence people shown in at least one photo, and there were CIA people at the prison. I wonder which one of these six acting alone bad apples brought along the electrodes, hoods, whips and chains? And how did they know so much about the best ways to humiliate Arabs? (read the rest of this shit…)

I don’t know how familiar anybody is with William Lustig. The guy is no genius. He made the MANIAC COP series. He made the picture UNCLE SAM which is a decent holiday slasher picture with subversive Gulf War themes, but it’s kind of a bummer because there is almost no use of stilts after the initial appearance of the Uncle Sam costume in a parade. Anyway after many years of directing bad horror pictures this guy started that company Anchor Bay which put out alot of better ones on video and DVD.
As long as I was renting ROLLING THUNDER I thought what the hell man, might as well also pick up ROLLING VENGEANCE which should be pretty fuckin good considering it’s the story of a man achieving the vengeance of the title by means of a huge monster truck with a drill on the front and flames coming off the top. I mean god damn if that isn’t a good premise right there. I am not at all surprised that somebody sunk their money into this pile of shit. Especially in 1987, when monster trucks like “Bigfoot” and what not were probaly about as close as a fucking truck could get to being a popular cultural type icon or whatever.
This great overlooked revenge movie was one of if not the first movie to deal with the effects of the Vietnam War. With a script by Paul Schrader (rewritten by another dude) it works on two levels, as a raw exploitation picture and as a depressing statement about the mess our country was in at the time. Fortunately we never repeated those mistakes ever again so this movie is completely irrelevant now and only good as a curiosity.
(another unused one for the ain’t it cool news.)
(Written for The Ain’t It Cool News, but they never put it up.)
Well for a while now I have been saying that this young man DMX is gonna do some good movies. He started out in a flawed but very artful crime picture called BELLY, before buddying up with Jet Li and my man Seagal and then riding around on those go-carts and doing wheelies and shit. (I guess I better rent that one.) He is still not a very convincing actor but he just has such a presence and charisma that I have faith in the dude for some reason. Too bad it’s not panning out so far.
Hey folks, Harry here… I’m so envious of Vern… he’s seen STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 – and while I know it was shot for 3 shiny canadian loons, I can’t help but hope it has more pretty people with vacant eyes being torn to shreds by big bugs! I can hope… right? Here he is…
SPOILER ALERT !!

















