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Posts Tagged ‘Looney Tunes’

March 2025 sci-fi (ish) double feature: ASH and THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP

Thursday, March 27th, 2025

Today instead of one regular-sized review I have two fun-sized looks at movies I saw in theaters last week. They are not making much money and might not last long, but I support the theatrical experience (please clap).


ASH is a low budget sci-fi movie produced by Shudder and directed by Flying Lotus, who I’m a little familiar with as a musician, but I have to confess I couldn’t make it very far into his previous cinematic effort, KUSO (2017). This doesn’t happen to me often but it was just too gross with its pervy opening segment about pustules and stuff. By comparison this one is normal and tolerable, but it still makes sense coming from the same director.

Eiza González (BLOODSHOT, CUT THROAT CITY, AMBULANCE) stars as Riya, a space traveler of some kind who wakes to find her ship in emergency mode, her entire crew dead (including one with a kitchen knife in his chest), not remembering what the fuck happened, or even who she is at first. She medicates herself to calm down (a patch that lights up when she puts it on her neck – nice future tech), wanders out onto the desolate planet where they’ve landed, looks up at cosmic mandalas in the sky, has little scary blips of flashbacks and begins to slowly remember some of the events leading up to this, including bonding with crew members Clarke (Kate Elliott, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT), Kevin (Beulah Koale, DUAL), Davis (Flying Lotus himself), and the captain, Adhi (oh shit, it’s Iko motherfuckin Uwais, MERANTAU, THE RAID, HEADSHOT, BEYOND SKYLINE, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US, TRIPLE THREAT, SNAKE EYES, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE). (read the rest of this shit…)

Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island

Tuesday, August 1st, 2023

August 5, 1983

When I do these summer movie retrospectives there’s usually an animated feature or two. I like that because if they’re a classic it’s a good excuse to write about them, and if they’re not it’s a good excuse to watch them. That can be painful, but I find the airballs pretty interesting, because so much loving craft still had to go into them in those days. I enjoyed reviewing ROCK-A-DOODLE, ROVER DANGERFIELD, FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAIN FOREST, TITAN A.E., and FREDDIE AS F.R.O.7, for example.

Most of those were from a weird time when Disney had become so successful it encouraged other studios to take a swing at the animated feature game, with mixed results. But the early ‘80s were that other weird time, the one when Disney had been so far out of the game that it left room for other people to try something different. For example the weird-ass Canadian sci-fi talking animal musical ROCK & RULE came out in April of ’83, and the George Lucas produced cut out animation movie TWICE UPON A TIME came out on August 1st. But I’ve already written about those, so today I’m here to discuss some of their competition. DAFFY DUCK’S MOVIE: FANTASTIC ISLAND was directed by animation legends Friz Freleng and Phil Monroe, which may sound promising, but this is what they call a “compilation film,” or in TV terms, a “clip show.” The new animation is just a framing device for edited down versions of ten classic Looney Tunes shorts. (read the rest of this shit…)