A Crud Load of Movies

"Hard Candy"

2010-03-27T11:12:00.000-07:00

Time to breathe some life into this old blog.

For some reason, I've stumbled on a bunch of different, awesome things that make me feel rather douche-y, like a college radio station that plays some of the best music ever (and by that, I mean Radiohead and Flaming Lips). One of these douche-y type things happens to be the Independent Film Channel, IFC, which has featured footage of SXSW among other things. It's a really neat channel to watch if you have it.

One of the movies I saw on this channel is Hard Candy, starring Ellen Page (you know, the Juno girl).

This movie is absolutely...mesmerizing. It's about a young girl who meets up with a guy she's been chatting with online. The guy takes her to his house and shows her his...photo collection, mostly consisting of under-aged girls. However, the girl (whose name is never really disclosed in the movie) drugs him and ties him to a chair, and basically tortures him for a good hour-and-a-half-to-an-hour.

Now, normally, I'd be against this. It's pretty much the reason I hated the gore splatter abomination, Flower of Flesh and Blood. But thankfully, it isn't gory torture. At least, most of it isn't.

Page's character basically fucks with his head, trying to make him confess to kidnapping a girl and possibly killing her. The guy denies all of this, begging her to let him go, but the girl keeps finding evidence to prove him guilty, all the while saying how the guy really doesn't know her or anything about her, and how messed up it is to take photos of underaged girls.

It reaches a point where the girl, finally fed up, decides to teach our pedophiliac photographer a lesson.

By cutting off his balls.

Seriously.

Thankfully, it doesn't show the man getting his gym-bag emptied out, but it's implied with all the awkward silence that follows the scene. You hear nothing but snips, and groaning, and the whole scene is just one big mindfuck that leaves you clutching your tender area in fear.

The ending is amazing, and you never see it coming, you really don't. It's a twist ending that leaves you saying, "Oh shit!"

So, what can I say? It's a psychological horror movie where Ellen Page tortures a suspected pedophile and cuts off his balls. You WILL like this movie. I guarantee it. I give it 5 awkward snips out of 5.

-jmm

A Christmas Carol: Walt or Williams?

2009-12-21T11:13:00.001-08:00

With that disturbing image of a big-eyed, quasi-realistic face coming towards you, smiling such a demonic and souless smile that seems to scream, "I SHALL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!", I begin this post.

When I was younger, the ABC Network had a block of programming called "The Wonderful World of Disney" which ran on Saturday evenings. I'm pretty sure it's not there anymore, which sucks because I always used to watch it whenever they showed animated movies.

Around this time of the year, they began showing, you guessed it, Christmas movies. On one such evening, they showed "Disney Christmas Carol", which was the first time I'd ever heard of anything from Charles Dickens.

And this is the version of the story which I enjoy this most. I mean, there just so many things to enjoy about it.

To sum it up: Scrooge McDuck plays Ebenezer Scrooge, Mickey plays Bob Cratchett, and one of his bastard offspring plays Tiny Tim. Also, Ratty and Moley from Mr. Toad, Gunpowder from The Adventures of Ichabod, and a few others show up, but who really cares?

Of the two versions of the story I'm to mention, this is the one I most prefer to watch. For one, it's Disney, which will always have the vice-like grip of nostalgia on my mind. Secondly, it's the funnier of the two movies: I mean, you have Goofy as Jacob Marley. How can you go wrong with that flawless logic? And secondly, the Giant from Fun and Fancy Free is in the movie. You know, the one with a slight touch of Down Syndrome? Once again, you can't go wrong with that kind of character-casting logic. If there's one flaw I can find in it, it's that the story itself is WAY too simplified and misses some of the important aspects to the story, and some of its haunting power.

But, as long as Jacob Marley is tripping over stairwells, I'm good.

Which brings us to this version, from Richard Williams.

To be blatantly honest, I don't know jack shit about Richard Williams' work. I know he did Thief and the Cobbler and some crappy Raggedy Andy cartoon. But I hope to eventually know more about Mr. Williams, as this bit of animated...I don't know WHAT to call it, was quite interesting to watch.

The most noticeable change between the two is the art style.

While Disney has talking animals and retards to tell its story, Williams insists on using life-like drawings which, as you saw from the image above, are so realistic it's damn creepy.

I noticed this change immediately when I found that Jacob Marley wasn't so much tripping over stairwells as wailing in the tenor voice of Satan himself, his mouth stretched out like the Other Dad in Coraline.

This movie is far closer to the book than Disney's approach. This includes a lot of the missing parts, including the particularly stirring moment when the Ghost of Christmas Present (along with his Robin-Williams-like-hairy-chest) reveals Want and Ignorance:

This image is always a great metaphor for the burden of humanity, especially today, with the desire for more money and a better economy and America's all around...dumbed-down-iness?. But that's another post on morals and literature, a post which I will not ever make. EVER.

While it sticks the closest to the story (basically, copying it), and as awesome as it was, it didn't stick to me like the Disney one.

For one, the art is...have you ever heard of "The Uncanny Valley"? The concept is that the more realistic something becomes, the less endearing and more creepy it becomes. For example, everything Robert Zemeckis has done recently is in the Uncanny Valley: it's so realistic, it's creepy and scary. Williams' art barely misses the Uncanny Valley, as some of the characters are caricatured. But it comes super close to being incredibly disturbing.

Another problem I had was the voices. For the most part, they were good (especially because Bob Cratchett kind of sounded like John Lennon), but Scrooge's voice was a bit too quiet for my taste. It sounds at some points like super-intelligent British muttering. But other than that, it was quite a good film.

Well, that wraps up my quick little review / comparison. See ya later, y'all!

-jmm

Porn in Mainstream Film #2 - Weekend Marathon!

2009-12-06T03:13:00.000-08:00

Six movies in two days. I feel like such a loser, but I love it so. Nothing makes me happier than to sit for hours watching movies. So why exactly am I watching "mainstream" movies that have connections to the world of porn? Because I am endlessly fascinated by sleaze. And filth. And smut. And all the things that make good kind religious people blush. And vomit. Plus I really don't find anything obscene about porn, it's just sex. If any of it really offended me, I'd just shut it off. True, a lot of it is degrading and stupid, but it exists to satisfy a base urge and thus doesn't require much intelligence to be put into it. Plus the level of production and acting talent involved are almost guaranteed to be the shoddiest of the shoddy, providing much amusement to my weird little brain. Porn films are the ultimate b-movies. I'm not much into modern porn films though, I tend to watch a lot from the 60s and 70s when they were required to have a story to keep people in the theaters after they'd finished their business. Sexploitation films were actually pretty tame compared to modern hardcore and in fact, most would only get an R-rating if they were released today. There's a whole history behind how porn films got started and developed that I've learned pretty much from listening to the commentaries on Something Weird Video DVD releases, but I've bored you enough, lets get to the first movie!

Orgazmo (1997)

Did you know that the South Park guys made movies before they made a ba-jillion dollars off of South Park? Well they only made two, but they're both really funny! Cannibal! The Musical (1994) is a musical about cannibal Alferd Packer. Orgazmo is about a Mormon missionary that needs money to marry his fiancée in Salt Lake City and gets roped into doing a porn film. Despite there being hardly any nudity and no sex, the film still managed to garner an NC-17 rating, because the ratings system is bullshit.
If you're really into porn you'll probably recognize several adult film actors. I only recognized a few, which puts my sad and lonely meter at about a three I think. Ron Jeremy plays Jizzmaster Zero. If you don't know who Ron Jeremy is, imagine Danny DeVito, only roundly beaten with the ugly stick. And then imagine him doing porn. Actually, don't. I haven't seen any of his films and have absolutely no desire to. The fact that I know who he is, is sad enough. But not as sad as recognizing Max Hardcore's small cameo. Never ever look up a Max Hardcore film. The man is a sick bastard and I think the ultimate test of the "I don't like what you do, but I support your right to do it" mantra.
But anyways, this film is hilarious and it left me wondering why I hadn't seen it sooner. If you doubt me, check out the opening to the film:

Now you want to see it don't you? You don't? Then please get the fuck out and don't let the door hit you on the ass.

Things I learned from watching this movie:
1. Peoples faces kick in really easily.
2. They're not the "Naughty Twins" they're the "Assfuck Twins."
3. Cock rockets are nothing to fuck around with.
4. Old ladies orgazaming is really funny.
5. If you're doing a porn film and someone mentions the name T-Rex, fucking run!

The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

I might as well just say what I learned from this movie right at the start:
1. Porn star Sasha Grey is fucking hot, but can't act for shit.
2. Rich people are really really lame.
Sasha Grey plays a call-girl girlfriend to the rich and the movie meanders along, showing random scenes from her life, and the viewer has to piece together what's actually going on for themselves. That gimmick is really the only thing that keeps the film interesting though, because otherwise there's not a whole lot to it. The characters are all cold and distant and snooty, and there's not much reason to care a fuck-wit about any of them. Stephen Soderbergh is a good director though and the whole thing is well made and has a certain atmosphere. If you like it or not is going to depend on your patience for pretentious Indie/art films. I've seen quite a few that move slower and suck worse, so this wasn't too bad. I'd get my stupid fix with the next film anyways.

Zombie Strippers (2008)

If you rent this movie....if you rent this movie you should know exactly what you're getting into. It's right in the fucking title. But you do get a bit extra right from the opening that smacks you right in the face with a limp dick "satire" of the Bush administration that comes back up in fits and spurts through out the running time. Thats exactly what I want in my zombie/stripper film. The whole thing is too afraid to let itself be a stupid B-movie and that robs it of a lot of campy fun, even though it all ends up becoming incredibly stupid. And there's a noticeable lack of sleaze, which really disappointed me. At least Robert Englund looked like he was having fun.
You know what? Fuck this movie. This is the type of movie a twelve year old would sneak into a slumber party and watch giggling with his friends all the while watching over his shoulder for his mom to walk in the door. I wonder if they'd get to the part where Jenna Jameson shoots pool balls out of her vagina before they got caught? It is kind of late in the movie.

Things I learned while watching this shit:
1. Turning you into a zombie makes you a really good stripper.
2. Guys are so stupid that even if a girl is a living rotting smelly corpse, they'll still throw money at her while she strips and let her take them into the back room for a lapdance.
3. It is possible to rip off Idiocracy and make it suck. Thank you Zombie Strippers!

High School Confidential! (1958)
My Sunday started off with this movie which has very little connection to porn, but I decided a porno break was in order. Plus I loves me some campy 1950s B-movies!
If you love them too, then you really need to see this one, it's hilarious. The outdated slang, outdated drug info, and the fact that it's pretty much a 50s version of 21 Jump Street, make it must see. Plus Jerry Lee Lewis sings the awesome theme song and stars in the opening! Jerry Lee is one of the coolest motherfuckers that ever lived, and he could have been bigger than Elvis except he screwed up and married his thirteen year old cousin. Pedophilia will get ya!
So the plot is that there's this new kid in town that sass-talks the teachers and the principal and lives with his aunt who's constantly trying to make moves on him. his aunt is played by Mamie Van Doren, who's one of the minor 50s sex-pots which is in no way a put down. She's fucking hot, I'll just say that. Fucking hot in that weird 1950s way.
But anyways, the kid (who looks about 30 and claims to have been in highschool for seven years!) starts trying to move in on the local drug racket that consists of weed and heroin. Seriously. Once you're hooked on reefers you move up to heroin. People who smoked pot at the time this came out must have been laughing their asses off watching this.
It's all great B-move fun with gangsters, car races, and stupid plot twists. And lots of curvaceous girls that they don't make anymore. Plus lots and lots of camp.

Things I learned from watching the hep cat jive:
1. If you run your car over a small ditch it will somehow land on it's top. (I rewound that part like 4 times, it's so funny!)
2. Weed leads to heroine which leads to gangsters and prostitution for small town highschool girls.
3. Never stash your stash in the hubcap of the car you're drag racing!
4. Beatnik poetry is really really funny to listen to.
5. Threating your principal with a knife and seriously hitting on your teacher will get you nothing but horrified looks from everyone.
6. Remember to always smoke those harmless cigarettes!
Alright, back to porn...

The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

It's hard to believe but there was a time when Courtney Love was not only a credible actor, but not bad looking either. It's a good thing too, because she has several nude scenes in this movie. Don't let that scare you though, it's a good movie.
Larry Flynt is one of those guys that, even if you don't like what he does, you still have to respect him. He's a very smart guy that just so happens to make very good money peddling smut. Anyone that has the balls to mock a massively popular religious figure by saying he had sex with his mother in an outhouse, and then to not back down when they get sued and thrown in jail for it, has my utmost respect. Mr. Flynt has balls, thats for sure, even if they're useless to him now. He's also had a hell of an interesting life, one that's only really hinted at in this two hour film. It all moves by pretty quickly and when it's over you'll want to learn more about this guy and his never ending quest to push the limits of free speech and good taste. God Bless Hustler and God Bless Larry Flynt.
Unfortunately there's no extras on the disc so I'd suggest you also rent...

Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone (2008)
This hour long documentary is what should have been included as an extra on the above DVD. It's a bit skimpy on his personal life, but you do get brief glimpses of some of the real people that were fictionalized for PVLF. Flynt's fourth wife Althea (there was no mention of the other wives in the movie) doesn't seem as crazy as Courtney Love portrayed her, but I think Love as pretty much playing herself in that movie anyways. Maybe that's why her performance seemed so good?
The doc focuses mostly on Flynt's politics through interviews mostly with the man himself when he was young and full of pep, and now when he's old and confined to a wheelchair after getting shot in the spine. It also reveals that they've probably found his shooter, which was left open ended at the end of the movie.
If you're like me and believe that free speech should be preserved, even if you don't like what the person is saying, then you'll probably like both of these movies. If you don't then you're probably Jerry Falwell. Go back to masturbating to pictures of your mother.

Things I learned from watching both movies:
1. If you're pissed off at a trumped up obscenity charge, throw oranges at the judge. And wear the American flag as a diaper.
2. Watching the real Larry Flynt (who has a cameo as a judge) sentence his younger self to jail time gives one a very weird feeling.
3. When shooting a sex scene for a porn magazine, make sure your smoke guys know what they're doing.
4. Actually the thing I learned most is just how much I really hate snooty uptight authority figures, and just how much fun it is to see them made a mockery of.

So, was any of this interesting? Please give me feedback! If you want me to blather on about movies some more, next time we'll have a bunch of documentaries and the first volume of an infamous TV show. Plus maybe another b-movie or two.
Stay Classy!

Porn in Mainstream Film #1

2009-11-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

My Netflix movies came in on Sunday rather than Saturday but I did manage to get two of them watched after I stupidly started later than I should have. I'll talk about the good one first.

Rabid (1977)

The problem with modern day zombie movies is that they're so formalic that they're becoming boring. Most of them are just ripping off George Romero's zombie movies (even Romero himself seems to have fallen into this rut). I'm not putting Romero down, I love the guy to un-death, but it saddens me that we can't get zombie movies that have variety anymore. No one wants to play with the rules, everything plays by established rules and any variation will make the zombie fanboys scream with rage. It's a genre that's become safe for mainstream consumption, although they haven't been pussified as much as vampires, thank god.
So it was a huge relief to watch a zombie movie that followed it's own rules, that was gleefully sick, and one that was incredibly low budget, like a fucking zombie movie should be.
Okay, so Rabid isn't explicitly called a zombie movie. I think that you could rightfully argue that it's not. It stars porn star Marylin Chambers (most famously of Behind the Green Door fame) as a motorcycle accident victim given an experimental skin graft that, for shakily explained reasons, makes her lust for blood which is sucked through a penis in her armpit. I'm am not making that up. Can you guess who the director was? If you guessed David Cronenberg, then you've probably seen his other movies. Cronenburg is the king of body horror movies including the famous head explosion in Scanners. There's a kind of gleeful reveling in disease and body fluids that pervades his work that I really dig. When you pick up one of his movies, you know you're in for a sick good time. His movies are also surprisingly intelligent. Underneath the blood and violence there's a lot of subtle things going on.
So Chambers and her arm penis lust for blood. The only problem is that her victims turn into zombies that foam at the mouth and lust for blood themselves, a fact that she doesn't become aware of till it's too late. They're mindless zombies, but they can be killed like normal people and in fact, they actually die by themselves if they're left alone. So why does the epidemic spread till It's taken over the whole city of Quebec? I think the subtle implication is the government is incompetent and doesn't realize what's going on until it's too late and they end up pretty much just acting as a clean up crew for bodies. What's funny about that is the movie was itself partially funded by the Canadian government as part of it's program to further the Canadian art scene. I guess governments aren't that great at grabbing subtle things.
So...what of our porn star, Marylin Chambers? She's surprisingly good actually. She's not great but if you didn't know that she was a porn star, you'd have no idea. It's kind of funny though because there's several scenes that seem like they could have been made for a porn film, except instead of sex there's violence and blood. Take an early scene, for example, where Marylin wanders into a barn and the horny redneck farmer finds her. Total porn set up right? Except the farmer gets a needle penis to the eye instead of getting into Chambers pants. I don't think Cronenberg planned it that way, but thats the way it came across, at least to me.
It's sad that Chambers didn't have much of a career in mainstream film after this because I think she would have fit quite well. This was made in 1977 after the general publics fascination with porn had worn off which is probably one of the reasons why she ended up going back to porn after this.
I love Cronenburg and I would highly recommend any of his films and this is a very good early one. Marylin Chambers is hot as all hell, Santa gets gunned down, and you get to see a zombie movie that doesn't follow the rules of the game.

Daylight (1996)

To paraphrase Spoony, some movies are awesome because they're well made films. Some movies are awesome in spite of the fact(or maybe because of the fact) that they're terrible. Daylight one of the second type, like most disaster movies. It manages to entertain despite the fact that it's completely implausible and, to put it nicely, shit-balls retarded.
Stallone stars, in what he said at the time would be his last action film which of course was a lie, as a taxi driver that used to be the head of some sort of city funded rescue team. He's a taxi driver because something happened on his last gig and a bunch of people died. They explain it but it's not important. Like most disaster movies all the characters are paper thin cliches that spout inane dialog that makes the writer part of me cringe whenever they speak. Stallone has a speech about the first guy that ate oysters that had me laughing pretty hard. I'd love to meet the screenwriter and ask him what the hell he was thinking.
But anyways, some guys are illegally hauling toxic waste through a tunnel when some morons that stole a car crash into them and all their trucks explode causing the tunnel to collapse and trap our walking cliches inside. Whats really funny is that everyone in that tunnel should have been dead since they all get enveloped in a HUGE FUCKING FIRE BALL! There's no way being in their cars would have saved them and there's no explanation as to why those people survived and everyone else got roasted. I guess they lucky ones had their windows rolled up.
So everyone's trapped and Stallone has to go in and rescue them! Yah! Well actually he comes to rescue them and then tells them he really didn't have a good plan for getting out once he got into the tunnel. Then they all bitch at him. Throughout the course of the movie the tunnel collapses, spews fire and water, and tries to kill as many of the annoying sobs as possible. Towards the end Stallone gets really pissed and starts screaming at the tunnel. Then he blows it up. It's a stupid ending to a really stupid movie mostly because EVERYONE SHOULD BE DEAD RIGHT FROM THE START!
Oh well, at least the special effects look good, and thats the only reason anyone watches these things anyways. Shit gets blown up real good, bad actors try to emote, the laughably 90s end theme song plays and we all go home, thankful that we're not trapped in a tunnel with the guy who starred in Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.
Wait. Where was Madison Stone? That's the only reason I rented this thing, where was my porn star? Madison's part was so small I actually missed it the first time and had to hunt her down in the credits which said that she played a reporter. I couldn't really remember a part with any reporters though, except for a scene early in the movie that might have been it. I rewound it and, lo and behold, there she was, sitting at a typewriter for literally like a second during a pan over in an office scene. I hardly recognized her since she had this weird wig on and looked like an old lady! That pissed me off! Madison was an alright actress, why didn't Hollywood giver her a chance? Oh well, if I ever make a movie I'll be sure give her tattoo parlor(www.myspace.com/madisontattoos)a call and see if she wants to be in it.
Oh well, this movie was a stupid good time. It'd be a great movie to rip apart with friends. Be sure to check out the making of documentary on the DVD to see how some of the impressive special effects were done and listen to the director blab on till you want to pop his over-sized head with a pin. Oh and be sure to watch the included music video which is 90s cheese at it's very best.

So that was the first installment of Porn in Mainstream Film. Next time we'll be looking at a comedy about the porn industry, a drama and a documentary about the porn industry, and some more b-movies starring porno actors. It should be a good time. Thanks for reading!

Problems

2009-11-15T04:42:00.000-08:00

Netflix sent me a broken DVD. A glitchy unplayable disc that turned the screen into a nightmarish blur of pixels and froze up my DVD player. This was a godsend because the movie happened to be Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 which is currently sitting at #1 on IMDB's Bottom 100 list. It's the last film of Bob Clark who directed both Porky's movies, Black Christmas, and both A Christmas Story and it's little known sequel, It Runs in the Family. It also stars Jon Voight who won an Oscar for 1978s Coming Home and Scott Baio who loved Chachi and give Cartman pinkeye. At least two of those three people should fucking know better!
In the opening Jon Voight gets beat up by a five year old. But thats not really the most cringe worthy thing. The thing that made me put my hands over my eyes was the incredibly fucking creepy CGI lips they put on the babies to get them to talk.
I only got sixteen minuets in and I was already light-headed from taking shots of schnapps after every terrible joke and uncanny valley'd lip movement. I'm glad I don't have to watch anymore of this piece of shit. I don't know why I started on this project in the first place. These movies defy description. They deserve to be shot into the sun or buried under the ground or melted down and used as bedpans in hospitals. They don't deserved to be watched because by watching them we validate their existence which they really don't deserve at all.
So, I failed but at least I learned something. I learned that there are bad movies, and then there are godawful pieces of shit that no one in their right mind would sit through unless they had a fucking gun to their heads. Movies like this are depressing. They're depressing because people put time and effort into making them. Someone thought up the idea, someone sat down and wrote a script. Other people wrote the painfully awful jokes. They had a casting call and people auditioned to be in this fucking thing. Sets were built, time was spent directing and editing and finishing and all to create this abomination.
I feel broken. Even though it wasn't my fault that I couldn't watch anymore than sixteen minuets of this thing, I was seriously already struggling not to turn it off and throw the DVD against the wall. I could have fast-forwarded and watched as much as I could, but I really had no will. I just wanted it to end.
At two movies in, this project is officially over. I'll still review bad movies but no more from the Bottom 100. I don't know if my soul can take anymore of this.

Next time: Porn! Well, sort of: all the porn-related stuff you can get on Netflix! Porn actors in mainstream films, porn documentaries, mainstream films about porn, and R-rated edited for content porn films. Huzzah! I feel a little better just thinking about it...

Edit: And no, I'm not putting up clips from Youtube. This film deserves to die and the only way that's going to happen is if we ignore it's existence. (Slams head against wall till forehead is bleeding.) There, what was I writing about again? Oh well, I guess I forgot! I also forgot my middle name, dammit...

Chicken Run Review

2009-11-06T18:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, I meant to post this a couple days ago after I watched it, but I've been distracted. Hopefully everyone's had enough time to see it already.

Ian's Review:

I'm quickly becoming a big fan of claymation, simply because it's such a fun looking medium and even if nothing else is going on in a movie it's still interesting to me to watch inanimate objects movie. I don't know if I saw any Wallace and Gromit as a kid, but I did see this movie and remembered that I enjoyed it, but didn't remember much else about it. So in that regard, I found this viewing quite satisfying.

The plot is fairly well formed for a 80 minute film and I didn't dectect much, if any, pandering to children or adults. The characters are all fun to look at although some of the chickens look a little too similar, but with 80 or so on screen from time to time what could I expect. The characters are a little bit one-dimensional and only Ginger seems to have a real personality, but the others are good for a few laughs.

My favorite thing I would have to say, after some of the gags, was probably the colors, everything looks rich but not garish, it wasn't neon pastel, there were real earthy tones with highlights of pleasing colors throughout the film.

My only real complaint would be Mel Gibson, and not so much the man himself (because this movie was cast long before he became a disreputable character), but he's just not a voice actor. I'm not saying they need someone with a super cartoon-y voice like Tom Kenny, just someone who would take the part seriously. The cocky self-assured-ness fits the character, but it sounds like Mel didn't really care about the role from time to time. The other voice actors fit perfectly, even if some (Mr. / Mrs. Tweedy) were more or less stock voices.

All in all, I'd give the film 4 out of 5, if you like claymation or a fun silly story you'll enjoy it quite a bit, but it's not something I'd call a "must-see".

Gory Double Feature: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

2009-11-01T16:27:00.001-08:00

I have seen both of these movies just right now, and let me tell you: they're not for the faint of heart. Let me just tell you some things about the movies themselves before I do my reviews:

Nobody under at least 13 who has never seen a bloody horror movie before should avoid these movies. Hell, even in "Flower", they warn you that it should be forbidden to sell the movie to anybody under 18. I am 14, and I got sick watching this. These movies are Passion of the Christ times 50. These are Dawn of the Dead times 70. And they're My Little Pony times infinity in creepiness. Read back on my old posts and you'll see I've also seen a man get a metal tube lodged up his ass. But I didn't get sick watching that. I cringed, but I didn't puke. Both of these movies made me sick. So, test yourself: do you puke watching Tetsuo when he gets that probe trapped in his ass? Then you should not watch this movie. Do you cry when you see his dick morph into a drill? Then you should not watch this movie. I'm not saying don't watch it: if you're that sick, watch the whole freaking thing. Rewind it and wank to the bloodiest scenes. I could give a damn. Just know that I don't condone this.

Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), directed by Hideshi Hino

This movie is described on Wikipedia as a "snuff film", where people are shown to be violently murdered. Apparently, some people wank to this. If you wank to this, good for you, you bastard.

For some background: Charlie Sheen actually sent this movie to the FBI because he thought it depicted someone actually being killed. Hino had to prove this movie's murder scenes were all fake. Same with Cannibal Holocaust.

Oh, and I watched the whole movie with no sound. It came with subtitles. I didn't need any audio. And you don't need audio. Just have some Cannibal Corpse in the background and you have the appropriate sound you need.

The movie itself starts off with a woman being stalked and chased by a man. He eventually catches her and smothers her. We are taken to her being bound and gagged, apparently at this man's domicile. There's blood all over the walls. And she hasn't even been touched yet, mind you.

She's tied to a bed and can't get up. Standing before her is a man dressed as a shogun sharpening a weapon. She tries even harder to escape. He picks up a chicken and says "This is your fate." He cuts off its head with a scythe.

You see all of this. And I don't dare make this up.

He drugs her, and then cuts her clothes off. He then proceeds to cut her apart. And it starts with her hand. He doesn't just slit her wrist like some emo hipster prick, no: he cuts it OFF. And he's clearly getting a boner off of this. The camera constantly cuts to the tools. You're just thinking, "Which one will he use next?"

The rest of the movie follows about the same: it's very slow paced, which makes it even harder to watch. It is purely a sadistic hour of cutting limbs off of this poor girl and watching the blood splatter and the bones crack. And all the while, she can't feel it.

To watch this, I had to go to the bathroom a couple of times. I needed to get away from it. It took me 5 minutes, and then I'd come back and sit through the rest. This happened 10 times.

This movie is nothing tasteless violence. If you thought GTA had tasteless violence, then Flower will steer you in the right direction. Cutting off the woman's limbs is supposed to be sexual to this samurai dude. I will not recommend anyone to see it. But if you're going to, or if you have to because of a dare, then let me just warn you: you will not be able to sleep for the whole night. I think I'm going to hell for watching this movie. And I'm an atheist. 1/10.

Our next movie is pretty much just as bad but...it serves as a fake documentary of, well...cannibals.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

While Flower had violence towards a single woman, this movie is all around violence: it's violence towards women, animals, men, fetuses, monkeys, and most of all, the audience.

How bad is it?

16 minutes in: man falls on top of a skeleton covered in maggots.
18 minutes in: native cuts up a live rat.
19 minutes in: another native eats live rat's innards.
20 minutes in: native fucks a woman with a hard rock. Both of them are covered in mud.
21 minutes in: makes woman's vadge bleed with a ball of rocks and mud. He actually kills her.
30 minutes in: natives smoke a woman out of the trees.
31 minutes in: savage beating
Still 31 minutes in: cutting a native's stomach open
32 minutes in: hardcore mud fucking. Again.
52 minutes open: they basically cut up a turtle.
1 hour in: natives cut the face off of a monkey.
1:10 to 1:13: natives perform a live, homemade abortion and stone the mother to death.

And I skipped over the stonings, the impalings, and the missing piranha scene. This movie is gruesome. Extremely graphic. But to some, it actually serves as a social commentary. What to us is civilized and uncivilized? What to us is taboo and what to others is regular life is different. Both films illustrate this to a degree, but it's mostly Cannibal Holocaust which begs the question.

That doesn't make it any less disgusting and graphic, but it had a helluva lot more meaning than Flower did. It at least warrants a 5/10.

To a degree, Cannibal Holocaust has a bit more credibility as a film than Flower does. And by a bit more, I mean this movie has an understandable plot. It may be fake, but at least there's a damn story. It's not a psychotic bastard cutting a woman up to add her to his body part collection. It's a bit more in that. It's still pretty a bad movie, but it's not as bad as Flower of Flesh and Blood. It has a plot. Not a good one, but it's a plot.

I write this the day after I saw these: I got 6 hours of sleep. Normally, I can get 10, but I could not sleep thinking about these movies. If you're going to see them, do it over a weekend and not on a Sunday so you don't fall asleep during math class or whatever it is adults do.
-jmm

"Dawn of the Dead" (1978)

2009-11-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

Dawn of the Dead (Zombi) (1978)

Wow. Apparently, 1978 was a really good year for horror movies. You had the John Carpenter masterpiece that was "Halloween", and now you have George A. Romero's zombie flick, "Dawn of the Dead". Why couldn't I have been born 7 years before that and have the shit scared out of me by these movies? Why?!

As you can guess, after watching a masked murderer smash the one guard who treated him well in a mental institution with a TV and a man's penis morph into a dril l, I wasn't quite sure how Dawn would be. I mean, you had the Halloween remake bludgeon you with violence and profanity, and you had...well, Tetsuo. I wanted something that would hold my attention after 5 minutes.

And it had no trouble with that, because this movie starts with a SWAT team raiding a building. Bullets flying, Puerto Ricans dying, it's all a crazy wave of violence and police brutality. And THEN the zombies start coming! People get bitten, zombies get shot, at least one of the police dudes kinda looks like Mark Hammil: it's starting to get really bloody! In the first 15 minutes, I counted like 30 people dying (and that's including zombies). Shit, 16 minutes into it, the two cops shoot up an entire room filled with zombies.

Oh yeah, and there's a plot. A couple of cops and their friends are trying to escape Philadelphia and head to Canada to escape the zombie hordes. On their way, they end up stopping at a shopping mall as a place to rest. They find supplies and everything they need to outrun the zombie apocalypse.

I really don't want to spoil it like I did with the last two movies. I'll just leave it at that.

Well...okay, the girl's pregnant.

I'll leave you to squirm now.

All in all, I love the violence and story in the movie, as I always do with Romero's work. The entire theme of being trapped in a mall has always been interesting (I've seen this movie a few times and play Dead Rising endlessly). The story is always engaging. There's never a slow moment in the whole movie. Definite 10/10.

Highlights:

Peter (played by Ken Foree) has to shoot two little kids who have turned into zombies. I shit you not: two cute, adorable, blonde-haired zombie kids run at him and try to bite him. He takes them both out with an M16. I was on the floor in hysterics because it all looked so damn funny.
In the beginning, a woman tries to hug her zombie husband. Lady: his skin's gray, his eyes are dead, he's not your husband anymore. Get the fuck away from him! Apparently, the zombie must've heard what I said, because he bit her shoulder off (and it looked like he had just bit into styrofoam. And he probably did.)
Dead Rising is a rip-off of this movie. Two of the cops even get weapons out of a damn gun shop. Everything you can do in that game was probably done in this damn movie.
This movie laughed in my face by accomplishing my two greatest wishes: running around with zombies in a mall and sliding down the banister of an escalator. Damn you, Romero!
My guess is that Romero was a fan of classic cartoons, The Three Stooges, The Marx Bros. or Laurel and Hardy: there's an entire scene where bikers tear up the mall and spray seltzer and throw pies at the zombies.
This movie ends with what would eventually be the Robot Chicken theme song. Enough said!

------------------
ADDENDUM
------------------
I promised the next review would be of "Flower of Flesh and Blood", the second movie in the Japanese Ginni Piggu series. However, I've had some trouble finding it. I only now started loading it. So, that'll have to come tomorrow.

But, to make up for it, it'll be a Gory Double-Feature: Flower of Flesh and Blood and one of the most gory, controversial movies out there: Cannibal Holocaust.

------------------------------------------
ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM
-------------------------------------------
As you can see, I posted the reviews already. Never mind the bullshit up top.

Halloween: Carpenter Vs. Zombie

2009-11-01T12:08:00.000-08:00

I must admit to a sin I wish I could have hid a bit longer: I've never seen the Halloween movies.

Any of them.

Not the awesome original one, not the less awesome sequels, or any of the new ones.

Well, at least I hadn't. I took it upon myself THIS Halloween, since I wasn't doing anything at all (not that I do anything at all usually), to see not only a bunch of bad
horror movies, but also the Halloween movies. I mean, everybody else in my family has seen them: my dad, mom, cousins, everybody has seen them. Except for me. Maybe it's because I never had enough time, or because I just barely heard about torrents, but I realized I had to take it upon myself to see Halloween.

And as of last night, I've done it.

My reaction?

Halloween (1978)
I saw this one first. This is the one that started all the madness, all the sequels, all the legends, all the remakes...started freaking everything.

One note about the movie: it was made in the 70's / 80's. As a society, we had some different ideals on what was scary and what wasn't. This movie is definitely not as gruesome as the movie I eventually saw this morning. It's much more subtle.

The story remains the same: 10-year old Michael Myers kills his sister and is sent to a crazy house. Dr. Samuel Loomis tends to him for 15 years until he escapes (we don't see what Michael was like in those 15 years, though), and he returns to his home in Haddonfield, Illinois, where he begins his murderous rampage.

One thing that is unique about this movie is that when Michael first kills his sister, Judith, it's done so that we don't see his body. It's shot from his perspective in the mask. All you hear is is breathing, and you see what his eyes see. That was never done before (at least, I'm not sure it was) at that time, and it scared the shit out of everyone. No one had ever had something done from a killer's perspective.

Anyways, cut back to when Michael returns home. We have three teenage girls who have plans on Halloween (one of them, Laurie Strode, being a young Jamie Lee Curtis): two of them are babysitting, and one of them is going to be with their girlfriend. Curtis' character is babysitting young Tommy, who questions her about what a Boogeyman is.

At the moment, Samuel Loomis is searching for traces of the escaped Michael. He finds that he's returned home when his sister's tombstone is found missing. He continues his search through Haddonfield.

I won't spoil who gets killed and how, but let me give you some hints: one dies in a car, one gets killed while naked, and one of the characters, whom I didn't mention, gets picked up and stuck onto a cupboard.

The violence in the movie...I guess you can say it was tastefully done. I mean, it wasn't an all out gorefest like the remake was. It was still violent, but the way Michael kills his victims is clever.

The most important of Michael's character is that he doesn't say anything. He never said anything when he killed his sister, he never says anything when he kills his victims. All you see is the white William Shatner mask, and all you hear is that scary, deep breathing. Other than that, you don't find out anything about Michael himself. While that does add to his scaryness, you also don't know anything about him, unlike in the remake.

At its time, this was an extremely scary movie. But, after seeing a man get a tube jammed into his ass, I can't say this is the scariest movie I've ever seen. It's good, don't get me wrong. It just didn't make me shit myself like I was hoping it would.

I'd give it an 8/10.

Now onto the remake: Halloween (2007):

I've always been a fan of Rob Zombie. His music is really good, and I've heard a lot of good things about his cinema. He's very good at giving off that dark and spooky vibe in both. So, coming to see this, I felt very excited. I could only guess just how bloody and profane this movie would get.

Today, we have different sensibilities on what's scary and what isn't. Today, as moviegoers, we have to see everything. Every blood splatter, every wound, every unsavory head explosion and every nipple of the dead teenager who dies first. There's not much room for subtlety, here.

And it goes to show through the movie: in this remake, it starts off differently. Instead of just seeing Michael kill his sister, we see his family: his father's an abusive, profane cripple, his mom's a stripper, his sister's a slut, and he's just a weird kid who nobody likes and has no eyebrows.

See? He HAS NO FUCKING EYEBROWS! Awesome Kurt Cobain hair, but no eyebrows.

Anyways, he's constantly getting trouble at school, to the point where he is interviewed by Dr. Samuel Loomis, who tells his mother that he is an unstable, violent individual.

This is what I like about the remake: we don't see enough of little Michael in the first. We don't know what makes him a killer. We just know that he was batshit crazy. We don't see what made him this way in the original. Now, we find he has a messed up family life and a terrible school life! This was a plus for me.

Anyways, he beats up a kid who showed him a poster of his naked sister. Seriously. He wears a clown mask and beats the crap out of him with either a shovel or a piece of wood. I don't remember. But, it's intense, it's bloody, it's brutal. In fact, I think he kills him.

Then, that Halloween night, he kills not only his sister, but his father and boyfriend. And they're all done uniquely and brutally: boyfriend gets the bat, father gets slit in the throat, and his sister still gets stabbed for being a filthy slut.

What follows is a very disturbing sequence where Michael is being questioned and examined by Dr. Loomis. He continues to become less and less social, creating multiple masks to "hide his ugliness". And then he kills a nurse and causes his mom to kill herself.

After 15 years, (at which point he has a massive mask collection that would make each and every member of Slipknot, Hollywood Undead, Mudvayne, AND Mushroomhead jealous), Dr. Loomis reveals that he can no longer care for Michael. He goes on to make a book, and that's not important.

What is important is that Michael escapes and kills two sanitarium employees who try to rape a crazy girl. They do it in HIS room. And that ain't cool. Then he escapes, kills the driver of a truck (who is caught reading a porno mag!), and moves on to Haddonfield.

The rest of the story is the same: he kills a couple kids, blah blah blah, Boogeyman crap, blah blah blah. And it's all bloody, it's all intense, and it's all brutal.

And I mean, really brutal. Michael is so much more violent now than he was in 1978. The entire world is much more violent now than it was in 1978. I mean, compare the two: in the old one, nobody cursed. In the new one, even Dr. Loomis curses! In the old one, Michael didn't smash a guard with a TV. When Rob told John Carpenter that he was remaking Halloween, Carpenter told him to remake it like he would.

And Rob Zombie did a good job with this movie. This is the one modern slasher movie I like. It's violent as fuck and nasty as fuck. That's what was missing from the old one: it may have been violent, but it wasn't nasty. That worked in the 70's and 80's, but me, being born in the 90's and raised on bad action movies, this Halloween sticks to me.

It scared me where the original only creeped me out. While the old one has subtlety and tasteful violence...this one has titties and tasteless violence! It really all depends what you want in a movie. Since I can go either way, I love both.

But, since this one hits me harder than the old one, I'll give this one half a point more than the original: an 8.5/10.

NEXT REVIEW: Flower of Flesh and Blood

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)

2009-11-01T10:16:00.001-08:00

The Japanese are known for making some messed up stuff, from cartoons where humans / aliens with tails magically explode into blonde-haired, super-muscular badasses without even using a steroid needle, to putting squid and mayonnaise on pizza.

But, after seeing all these, they pale in comparison to the epitome of Japanese fuck-up-ed-ness that is:

Tetsuo is a very complex movie. The story itself is only revealed around the end, and until then, you're left in a daze, wondering just what the hell is going on in this movie. It starts weird and ends weird, which is why it's perfect.

How would I sum it up in the beginning? Simple: a dude cuts his leg open and jabs a metal pipe into it.

This just sets the tone for the whole movie: what just happened? Why has it happened?

From here, I'll review the plot: after this idiot (who is only known as a Metal Fetishist, according to Wikipedia) jams a pipe into his leg, he sees maggots forming around it. He freaks out and runs outside, where he gets hit by a car. The driver of the car, who is only known as the Salaryman, is shown a minute later shaving his face, when he notices something metal growing out of his cheek. He tries to pull it, but it just spews blood.

The whole movie afterwards is just...wow. In the next scene, he's waiting for a train when the woman he sits next to is possessed by the Metal Fetishist and chases him throughout an underground train station until they end up in a garage where he just pounds her back with a bunch of different objects. He begins to notice that he's changing: there are pipes and wires coming out of his feet, weird mechanical devices are growing in his body. It's really starting to get freaky.

Next scene, there's an especially interesting scene where an exotic dancer with a probe in her vadge, as shown below, begins to terrorize our hero, the Salaryman.

She dances around him and the probe's crawling all over his body. She licks him and the whole scene would be extremely sexy and erotic if she didn't have a metal pole coming out of her bajingo.

Oh yeah, and it goes up his ass, too.

That's right. There is a scene in this movie where a steaming hot metal rod shoots up his ASS. And all the while, he's screaming and she's loving every second of it.

At this point of the movie, I'm not doing much of anything. I'm just sitting there, wondering what in God's name I've gotten myself into. There are probes going up people's asses, probes coming out of people's vagina's...what's going on?

That scene I just described was all a dream to the Salaryman, and when he wakes up, he starts banging his girlfriend. I mean, seriously banging his girlfriend. At one point in the scene, they decide to do some erotic, sexy eating. So, he cooks some food and makes her eat it ever so sexually.

And then, he continues to transform into a metal monster. To the point where his penis becomes a power drill.

Yes, you heard me. This man's dick becomes a fucking power drill.

And it stabs through a table.

Yes, you heard me. A fucking table.

This scene had me on the floor laughing. That guy must've had a lot of Viagra on him, because his wang has turned into a drill. That is an all new level of weird.

Okay, back to the movie: after he tears through a table, he runs into another room. His girlfriend comes after him and tells him, "I'm not bothered by anything." Apparently, she didn't notice the cock-drill coming through the TABLE. She opens the door to see him turn into a horrible metal monster. And he chases after her in a horny rage. She tries to kill him, stabbing in the shoulder with a knife or even using that pan against his face. Come on, lady: he just had a drill come out of his cock! Do you really think that a hot pan to the face would stop him now?

She stabs him and the neck, and his drill stops. And they start doing some freaky erotic stuff again. But once they start doing it, the drill comes back on and...

I guess she goes into the drill, and she gets killed. She's literally fucked to death. With a power drill. Coming out of a man's penis.

I won't spoil it because I know, by now, you're really wondering just how this all comes together. Let me just say that the ending actually does reveal everything. And having the Wikipedia page at your disposal also helps you along.

The ending is very bizarre. Extremely bizarre. Everything comes together and...it all makes sense.

After all this happening, you realize that you had to have seen it through to the end to even begin to fathom what just transpired.

I'll tell you that much about the movie. The rest you can see on YouTube.

There's not a lot I can say about this movie except "Damn". I've seen Jim Caviezel get tortured, I've seen terrible killers dressed in William Shatner masks. But I've never EVER seen a power drill grow out of a man's penis before.

Halloween Movie Night For Anybody Interested!

2009-10-31T16:11:00.001-07:00

Hey, guys. John-Michael Morgan here with a spook-tacular post on for Halloween! (GOD, that was fucking lame! -Ed.)

Thanks to AMC and YouTube, I've found a couple of sweet horror movies which I will watch tonight. I'll review them tomorrow morning in a fresh pair of non-shat-in pants and each one of y'all can jump in in the comments.

Okay, tonight's movies will be:

The Shining
Halloween (the original version by Carpenter)
Halloween (the new version by Rob Zombie)
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead (1979)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Flower Of Flesh and Blood
Mermaid In a Manhole
Braindead (I know Kurdt already reviewed it)

I'll try and watch all of them tonight. I'll still probably have some on the list for the morning.

Wish me luck!

-jmm

Cinema Sewer #2

2009-10-26T05:22:00.000-07:00

Pocket Ninjas (1997)
Before I put this movie in, I was cleaning my glasses and they broke. One of the side joints completely snapped rendering them unwearable and I had to use my crappy back up pair to watch this movie. So I put the thing in and I can't hear the sound. Well, I can hear it but it's so low and muffled that even with the volume turned all the way up, none of the dialog is audible. So I had to watch this on my computer. Why am I telling you this? Because I sat and watched this thing for over an hour and I really have no idea what the Hell happened in it. Pocket Ninjas is the most random horribly slapped together mess I think I've ever seen. Nothing makes a lick of sense, characters pop up and vanish all the way up to the end, and there's an opening credits sequence that lasts over nine minuets.

Here's the plot from the back of the Netflix envelope:
"When the evil Cobra Khan (Robert Z'Dar) unexpectedly steps out of a comic book and into the real world, he and his band of kung fu thugs begin plotting a sinister plan that will have dire consequences for the environment. The White Dragon (Gary Daniels) is determined to put a stop to Cobra Khan's scheme, but due to an injury, he must pass along this crucial responsibility to his three young students."

Okay, thats all well and good but Robert Z'Dar, who's the only legitimate actor here, is hardly in the movie at all. At no time does he "step out of a comic book" even though his big fight scene actually takes place inside a comic book. The whole middle part of the movie is comprised of the three kids sitting in a tree house making up comic book stories that have nothing to do with anything and are never mentioned again. Actually most of the movie has nothing to do with anything because most of the movie is comprised of random training/fighting montages featuring the absolute worst martial arts you'll probably ever see on film.

Alright, since the movie is so random here's some random stuff about the movie:
5. Pocket Ninjas had three directors. Three!
1. Nobody in this thing can act or emote at all except Robert Z'Dar and he's hardly given any lines. All he's required to do is act stupid in two fight scenes, take his paycheck, and go home. He's the greatest paycheck whore that ever lived. By the way, click here for a picture of the man. If you make fun of him, his chin will kill you dead, bring you back to life, and kill you again. It's happened before.
2. In the 90s ninjas were huge in kids films thanks to the Ninja Turtles and the 3 Ninja's trilogy of crap. This was obviously an attempt to cash in. It looks like they pulled random people off the street to act in it. In one scene you can clearly see that the dojo where most of the movie takes place is next to a liquor store!
3. Huge goofs: In one scene one of the kids is playing a gameboy and even though there's sounds coming from it, there's no cartridge in it.
During the big fight scene at the end one of the kids bites a bad guy on the leg causing him to howl in pain, even though the kid is wearing a plastic mask that covers his mouth.
31. Despite the fact that this was released in 1997 (made in 1994), the video and audio as well as the clothing and hairstyles scream 1980s so loud that it hurts. The jacket the dojo master wears is a hipster's wet dream.
4. I have no idea what was going on at the end. The kids go into this room and fight on this weird early 90s virtual reality game by controlling characters on a screen, one of which is played by Z'Dar again. There's no explanation and by all accounts the movie should be over. If you look close at the kids when it's over, you can tell that they're really bored and probably want to go home. Here, watch and be amazed.
6. This scene pretty much sums up the whole movie and I don't think I need/want to spend anymore time thinking about it:
I would suggest watching this with a large group of friends and lots of booze. Then it might actually be funny. As it stands, the whole thing fails so hard that it actually ends up being depressing.

The reason I rented this is because it's currently sitting at #1 on Imdb's bottom 100 list. I had to see the movie that was considered worse than both Manos and Monster a Go-go. Pocket Ninjas may not be worse than those films, but it's certainly up there.
I've decided to work my way down this list and watch the ones that are rentable so if you want to try and figure out what movie is coming next, you can probably get a pretty good guess from there. I'm not re-watching the ones I've already seen though, I'm not that masochistic.

Next time On Crud Load of Movies:

2009-10-22T14:37:00.001-07:00

I hope no one minds if I go ahead and pick the next movie?

I thought I would take it down a notch and go with something a little less adult, something without near rape scenes, although I'm fairly sure it has some near death scenes. I know it was nominated for a couple of Annie Awards but I'm not sure if it won or not. So without further ado, the next movie will be:

Chicken Run!

Now, admittedly I don't actually have netflix, I use blockbuster's online program, so I can't tell if this is actually available or not, but I was able to find it online in excellent quality here: Chicken Run

If that link goes down or doesn't play for some reason let me know and we can change it, otherwise I look forward to hearing back from everyone in a week or so. I'll probably be watching it next week, but I'll hold back on posting a review until at least November 2nd.

Akira

2009-10-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

Justin's review:

This is without a doubt the greatest piece of Japanese animation I've ever seen, and am likely to see. Every second of the film is beautiful, and the story is consistently interesting. From the very first hyper-detailed shot, I knew it had to be good.

Most people's criticism of the film is that trying to jam-pack every important plot point of the over 1,000 page comic work would be madness and of course come out looking bad, but I really think it worked, and that's what makes it great.

Baby old people, the hallucination scenes, Tetsuo as a giant quiverring mass of flesh, all the scenes left me... I can't think of the word. "Astounded" wouldn't sound right, but it represents it well enough.

As for the story, it may be better than the animation. I don't really want to reveal major plot points though, to those who haven't seen it, but if you haven't, WATCH IT RIGHT NOW!! Seriously. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I can't make time to watch "Akira" again in Japanese with subs...

2009-10-16T04:34:00.000-07:00

So I'll just write the review on Wednesday. How's that?

Cinema Sewer #1

2009-10-13T05:55:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Cinema Sewer where I'll be taking a look at the bottom of the cesspool of bad cinema. From horrible "family" films to made for TV crud to misguided lumps of poop that no person in their right mind would sit through. I'm not completely in my right mind though, so here we go with our first film:

Children of the Corn (2009)
When I heard there was a new Children of the Corn film out, I of course had to see it, if only to be able to still brag that I've seen every CotC flick. I was actually sort of hopeful for this one though. For one thing, instead of another ridiculous sequel, it was supposed to a re-do that used the original Stephen King short story as a base. That's a fantastic idea because that's one of the things the first movie did wrong, there's so much they could get right this time. Then I read that it was going to be a TV movie. (Cue groaning). Then I read that it was a Scyfy original movie. (Cue screaming: "Burn it with fire!") Still I had some hope for it, how could they fuck this up? Well, pretty easily actually.

For one thing, the director has no idea how to build tension at all. If you're not good at that, you'd think you'd at least resort to cheap jump scares but there's none at all! Therefore it's not creepy and it's not scary. Another thing is that even though it's not supposed to be a remake of the actual first movie, it has the same problems. For one, the kids aren't creepy at all. There's a ridiculous fight scene where the "hero" takes two of them on one at at time while the rest stand behind him and do nothing. I guess they're supposed to be kids and therefore stupid and weak but there's like 50 of them with pitchforks and axes! I'm pretty sure they could take down one mid size adult. In the original they're merciless and unstoppable and it made them creepy, how hard is that to get right?

Another major problem carried over from the first movie is padding. The Stephen King story is very short, which is one reason it works so well. To get the movie up to an hour and a half they had to pad of course and here's how: The first half of the movie is almost entirely this married couple bickering in their car. It goes on and on and on until you want to jump into the movie, grab the wheel, and run the car off the road. I don't think I've ever seen anything that annoying in a film, I was seriously shouting at them to shut up and it just kept getting worse and worse.
Oh yeah, and of course because she's a female in a horror movie, the wife is stupid and annoying and wears a very sheer dress and platform heels. Sigh. She also can't act for shit. Actually no one in this movie can act for shit.
Which brings me to another large problem: Issac, the leader of the Children. In the original he was played by a very creepy looking John Franklin who was actually one of the best parts of the movie. Here he's played by some kid who looks like he just stepped out of a juice commercial complete with large gap toothed front teeth.
The second half of the movie almost entirely padding. Our hero, his old lady's throat cut and body blown to smithereens, gets lost in a cornfield and starts having Nam flashbacks. Fucking Nam flashbacks in a cornfield, how much more ridiculous can you get? I would have been laughing if I wasn't so bored.
Oh and get this. The kids leave him in the field and go back to eat dinner after which they all head to the church. To watch two teenagers fuck on the alter. Seriously. It adds nothing to the movie but I think it was supposed to be shocking. Or maybe they just wanted to add boobs and pointless sex. Well at least I can now say I've watched a movie where two teenagers fucked in a church in front of a bunch of giggling kids. Is that a good thing?
The ending renders the whole movie pointless and I don't even want to talk about it. Now I think I'll list some good things about this movie.
For one, the cinematography is pretty damn good and the camera work is decent. I have to give props to the guys who did the gore effects though because it was actually well done. It's a shame they didn't use it to better effect though. Oh and they managed to severely buck the "no kids must die in movies" rule. But again, it's supposed to be shocking but the movie is so boring and pointless it renders it pointless as well.
Sigh. This could have been great, but they screwed it up again! Oh and there's a scene after the credits are over that sets up for a sequel! Dear God, please tell me it's not going to happen! You know I'd have to sit through it don't you? Please have mercy!

Extra features: A long documentary about the making of the movie. Seriously. I didn't watch the whole thing, just enough to get that the director is either highly delusional or insane. Probably a combination of both. Oh and he actually directed the original movie! So...he fucked up the same story twice? Good job dude, I think that means you fail at life.

Random Thoughts While Watching
1. Okay...that opening scene in the church tent was entirely pointless. Why was the child preacher wearing a 1950s cowboy outfit? That's not scary, that's just stupid looking.
2. She's a bitch and he's a jerk and they're both annoying as all Hell. Our heroes ladies and gents!
3. I didn't know it was possible to run so fast with your throat cut like that.
4. "Is that how you'd handle it in nam?" Enough with the Vietnam references already! We get it, you're not happily married anymore and he's a war veteran, you don't have to pound it into our skulls!
5. So he orders her to get back in the car and then goes off into the cornfield with a shotgun. Now you're a MAHN!
6. Oh great, teleporting ginger kid. How could he not hear the kid who was right behind him!
7. Arrrgh! Just shut up and open the stupid suitcase already you annoying twats!
8. Where did the kids find time to put those road signs up? And who are they for?
9. ARRRRGGH! Shut up shut up shut up! It's an abandoned town, look at the fucking place! How could you not tell?
10. Weird knife slash edits do not make this any scarier movie, sorry. You fail.
11. This is supposed to be a horror movie and we've spent most of it in a car listening to a bickering married couple.
12. Well at least the kids wrecking the car is kinda cool. It sort of reminds me of Over the Edge. Damn I wish I was watching that right now instead of this.
13. Car go boom! Wifey is cooked extra crispy! Wow, that was a huge explosion! Was that car carrying extra gas tanks under it's seats?
14. "Noooooooooooo!!!!" I predicted they'd be one of those. It's in slow motion even!
15. Oh Jesus. That six year old standing on a rooftop just threw a knife at the "hero" who was standing in an alleyway across the friggin' street and it impaled in the guys arm! You fail physics movie!
16. Then the guy pulls the knife out of his arm and snaps it in half! Now you're a MAHN!
17. So the guy takes on two teenagers who both have knives and kills them both while the other kids who have PITCHFORKS AND AXES just stand around and watch. Movie you just...fail...at everything.
18. Why does that kid have a rake? It's a farming town, there's probably lots of nice sharp tools to pick from and the kid picks a fucking wooden rake?
19. "I saw he who walks behind da wows." Says the cute little blonde kid who just stepped out of a Sears commercial.
20. Arrgh, this is taking forever! Running through the field, stupid Nam flashbacks, the kids eating dinner back home, what's the point of all this?
21. Boobs! Boobs? They're nice and all, but why? And a very ooogy sex scene. Aren't those teens supposed to be underage? I love that one kid in the crowd jumping up and down like a monkey.
22. So our "hero" finally makes it through the cornfield to the circle and gets killed by...something. Oh movie, couldn't you have just given us a glimpse of He Who Walks Behind the Rows? I'm not really surprised that you didn't though.
23. Oh and there's our "hero", all nice and trussed up on that serrated metal cross. Good, I'm glad you're both dead! Was that your intention movie? To make me wish these people were dead? Wait a second. How did they get the wife's body out of the car before it exploded?
24. Long pointless after credits sequence to set up possible sequel. Sigh, If it comes out, I'll have to watch it too, I know I will.
25. This whole fucking movie was pointless and annoying, and now I have to try and review it! Oh well, at least I get to rip it apart.

So that was disappointing and annoying. I hope you liked my review though. Next time I'll be taking a look at a movie that I know isn't going to be any good, so at least I won't have high expectations for it. Be sure to tune in!

New Series Coming Up

2009-10-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I've been spoiling myself by watching too many good movies and also haven't been writing about movies at all, so I decided today to start a new movie review series featuring the dregs of cinema. Look for the first post this coming week! I'll probably title it something like
It's a Bad Bad Movie!
or
Deep Hurting Reviews.

Any ideas for good titles?

Up on the slate:

Newest Children of the Corn movie
Pocket Ninjas
Death Bed: The Bed that Eats
Kung-fu Dog
Munchie
Munchie Strikes Back
Critters 1-4
Hellraiser 1-7 (Should be interesting)
The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
And for the ultimate in pain: Baby Geniuses I and II

Stay tuned!

Movie Matinee #1

2009-10-04T16:46:00.000-07:00

I don't really watch a lot of movies, and when I do, it's usually not a recent movie. I dunno why I'm like that because I then regret not seeing a new movie when everyone at school's talking about it.

So, I recently found out one of the great things about the Internet: Torrents. It's basically downloading something and then watching it. For free! No Netflix, nothing. Just about 5-10 minutes of downloading and there's a movie waiting for you to watch. I usually have to wait for the DVD to come out, but what the hey? It's better than buying DVDs.

Using this technology, I "borrowed" a couple of movies, which I won't exactly review as much as I will comment on.

Let's get this trainwreck started with:

Interesting points about Knocked Up:

It has Seth Rogen at his finest. I've seen a few Seth Rogen movies, another one of which I will review next, but this featured Seth Rogen, in my opinion, at his best. He's still that lovable loser he always is (even in Monsters vs. Aliens). I like his movies, he's goddamn hilarious.
It also has the incredibly hot Katherine Heigl.
These two actually do it somewhere in the first half hour of the movie! SCORE!

Okay, onto my commentary. To be honest, when it started rolling, I was like, "What the hell have I done? This is NOT funny." I mean, of course the idea of that Mr. Skin website was kinda funny, even after I found out something exactly like that existed. But it didn't floor me at all in the first half hour.

Just when I was about to leave, though, Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen boinked somewhere in that first half-hour. That was pretty good. And from there, the events which take place were set in motion. From there, it gets seriously funny! I mean, there are gas-mask bongs and samurai swords and topless chicks and fantasy baseball. Oh, and cursing. Lots of cursing. And yelling. Lots of yelling.

So, lots of yelling and cursing. Normally, I'd consider that a weak point, but there's an entire scene of Seth and Katherine fighting in a clinic that is just goddamned hilarious. I'm not gonna spoil it, just so it'll be pure when you finally see it.

For me, it was a good movie. Weak first half-hour, but after a while it gained momentum and by the end of it (which, by the way, has a vadge reveal), I felt good for FINALLY seeing it.

Overall, I'd rate it a decent 7.5 / 10.
Now, Superbad was an awesome movie.

As I said before, the first half-hour of Knocked Up didn't hit me.

The first 10 minutes of Superbad hit me and hit me hard! This movie is wicked funny.

For those who don't know the plot of this one: two high school kids (Arrested Development's Michael Cera and Jonah Hill from Knocked Up) are invited to a block party hosted by this one girl. They're asked to get booze, and they enlist the help of an extremely nerdy guy (also known as MCLOVIN') to help them get the alcohol with a fake I.D. People get punched in the face, cops show up at the liquor store, and it goes from one story to two when a pair of terrible cops (one of them being Seth Rogen again) get in the middle.

What makes this movie so great to me is the cops, played by the aforementioned Seth Rogen and Bill Hader. They're just so terrible at what they do! They go out drinking and shooting people, they can't arrest a guy for shit. They even blow up their own cop car!

Also, Jonah Hill's character draws a bunch of dicks when he's in 5th grade, and a lot of them are freaking hilarious.

Overall, awesome movie! Stayed funny whole way through, and I give it a solid 10/10.

When I first heard about Coraline, I heard about the movie. It took me a while to actually want to get to see this because I feared it would be too "Gothic". I had reason to be afraid because Twilight came out somewhere around that time, but this isn't about Twilight or my unfavorable feelings when it comes to the emo subculture.

Then I heard that Neil Gaiman, the author of the Sandman comics, was involved and had actually wrote a book that the film would be based on. It also took me a while to find out Neil Gaiman actually wrote a non-comic book...book.

So, I read the book first to see what I was getting in to. The book was well written from Coraline's perspective. Awesome book over all. Maybe I'll go see the movie, I thought.

And then, when I heard Nico Colaleo (of Internet immortality) talking about it, I realized I seriously had to see it.

This was extremely well animated, especially in a dying style like claymation mixed with 3D animation. The designs of the characters is so distinctive, and more importantly: FUNNY. I just started laughing when I saw the father's huge nose and turkey neck. I laughed even harder when I saw the Russian dude's design. And Wybie's skull-mask was super-badass.

The movie itself, plot wise, was very...interesting. In some points, it deviated from the book (like having Wybie involved), but for the most part, it stayed quite faithful. It even added an extra creepiness, particularly when the people from the "Other" world became hideous and grotesque. The idea of a "perfect" Other world got me when I read the book, and seeing that come to life on screen...super cool.

I really recommend seeing this movie to anyone. While it might come off to some as unappealing due to that dark theme, it's a really good story, and even better animation. 10/10.

I'll be the first to admit it: I love Pixar, and all their movies are great.

Toy Story was great.

A Bug's Life was great.

Finding Nemo was great.

Incredibles was freaking amazing.

Cars and Ratatouille were both great, and that was a low-point for Pixar.

Wall-E was another amazing one. I dunno why I like it, but I do.

So, coming in to see up, my expectations were rather high. I mean, Pixar hadn't let me down before.

And it didn't. In fact, this is the movie that succeeded in making me almost cry. In just the first 15 minutes, seeing Carl and Ellie grow up together, and then that tragic...I won't spoil it. But it's just really sad to watch. And coming from a guy who wouldn't even flinch after watching Passion of the Christ, that should really say something. I felt my eyes do that thing where you think you're just going to explode and start bawling, and I can't believe that happened.

The movie, afterwards, really starts to get good. I mean, actually making your house fly is the biggest middle finger to the Man and his laws of physics.

How many stories have an old man flying his house to South America? How many stories involve snipe hunts or dogs with mechanical SQUIRREL!...mechanical collars that enable them to talk. For me, Dug was like the strongest part of the movie. He behaves like how we dog lovers know a dog would behave. That's what made him funny for me. I know I can imagine my dog acting like that. This brings me to the fact that this movie had something I haven't seen till recently in computer animation: unique character animation. The animation on the characters was unique to each character. For once, the textures didn't look like they had crudely pasted thousands of realistic hairs and pores to the characters haphazardly. Even with Kevin's weird, colorful feathers, the colors in the movie actually didn't make me mad. Everything was just right for that kind of imaginative movie.

Also, the designs were pretty distinct. I mean, Carl's square head, the shapes on the dogs, even Russell. They were all designed to fit that character well. I consider that a step in the right direction.

There were issues that I found myself thinking about while the film was running, things that I didn't understand, or that I would have done differently. While I love how Carl and Russell behave together, I've seen it before. A young, wide-eyed kid works together with crotchety old guy. Crotchety old guy finds some stuff out about little kid, and little kid finds some stuff out about crotchety old guy. Along the line, they meet villain. Villain does something to crotchety old guy, crotchety old guy gets pissed at little kid. Little kid runs away, blah blah blah fart noise. This was the plot to Tarzan II, and that's what I feel is going on with this movie.

I still love it, don't get me wrong. But I can't help but notice this.

Plus: the way the villain dies kind of reminded me of how Clayton dies in Tarzan. I won't spoil it, but it's true. There are certain parts of this that simply remind me of other Disney movies before. It's not so much a bad thing as just an observation.

But, I love this movie, all things considered. Pixar has made another really good movie. Can't avoid that.

Overall, 9.5/10.

Juno is a movie I really didn't think I would like. Mostly because I didn't get the premise at first. You have a pregnant girl, a budding rock star, and Michael Cera crudely jammed into a commercial, and how the hell are you supposed to find out what the story is?

But, when I sat down to watch it, I found that it had a really good story. A pregnant teenager decides to put her baby up for adoption, and she goes through all the trials involved, including breaking up with the kid who knocked her up.

For once, this is a drama movie that I didn't hate. I normally watch comedies or horror movies or action movies because they look awesome. But I've never liked dramas or chick flicks. For good reason, they're goddamn boring.

This movie, though, didn't come off as a comedy. It was funny, due to Ellen Page's character Juno being quirky as hell (I want a burger-phone, too). Her opinions on music and stuff reminded me of...me, sadly. What she said was funny. But, the conflict that eventually came up was really...wow. I don't know how to explain it, but it just hit me. And I'm a guy, too. That just seemed really tough to have everything she planned to just crumble the way it did.

I really expected this movie to be something like Napoleon Dynamite. I don't know why, but it just came off as a quirky comedy like Napoleon. But, the problem was so much more real than Napoleon's conflict could ever be.

However, like Napoleon Dynamite, it had some great indie music. The soundtrack was great, I really need to pick it up.

All in all, it was an honest to God great mix of comedy and drama. It didn't go too far to be funny or too far to be sad. Great movie to watch. 9/10, and it lost that point because of having to watch the runners' junks bobbing up and down.

Where to Find My Movie Reviews.

2009-10-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

What's up?

For everyone who reads this, I just started a new blog, The Turquoise Journal. To contrast with a drawing blog, I have somewhat of a news and commentary blog. It's like what the Blackwing Diaries was for Blackwing Sketchbook, or The Daily Show to The Colbert Report, in some way I can't explain at all.

Anyways, I'll be posting some movies reviews on there that will then appear on here. Starting tonight, I'll be reviewing the following:

Coraline
Knocked Up
Superbad
Up
Clerks

I've finished watching them via illegal downloads, and now I will review them once I get the chance.

Enjoy!
-J.

Has everyone seen Akira now?

2009-09-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

I have. Though not in the original Japanese with English subs. Should I re-watch it with that?

Just a quick note...

2009-09-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

...if any of you want to eventually get to pick a movie and put up your own review, please shoot me an email at:

youngmancane_13@hotmail.com

The next movie.

2009-09-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

OK. I'm not up on Japanese animation. I like Dragonball Z and that's about it. BUT, this is apparently a monumental must-see film in any aspect. I've never seen it, but have high hopes for it. I hope you all like it too. I'll put up my review after I've confirmed we've all seen it, no specific dates or anything. Well, maybe early-mid October. It's only available as "save" on Netflix, but you can watch it here in 7 parts on Veoh.

You did say that the choices were limited to animation, right Kurdt?

Just a quick thing: To get the full video to play I had to sign up for an account and download Veho web-player. Not a big thing, it's all free, just thought I'd give you all a heads up.
-Kurdt

Edit: I found a full version in Japanese with English Subs!!!
Click Here!!!
- Kurdt

Additional Edit: It might take awhile to download, but the quality is much better than if you try and stream it. Cheers
-Kurdt

Animation Movie Club Meeting #1

2009-09-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

Wizards (1977)

Kurdt's Review:
The 1970s is my favorite decade of film. With the Hays Office and it's horrible code finally abolished in place of a ratings system, filmmakers were finally unleashed to make the films they wanted to. What they unleashed was a flood of gritty and sometimes down right nasty films, mostly shown in grindhouse theaters and drive-ins. But this underground aesthetic even leaked into the mainstream and thus we had films like Taxi Driver and the whole "porno chic" thing, where X-rated films were shown in mainstream theaters for a time. It was a very interesting time for pop culture, especially the underground. Comics, movies, and music all had their underground movements that leaked into the mainstream, at which time they eventually imploded. It was also a very pessimistic time, a lot of which was backlash against the hippy dippy love each other bullshit of the 1960s and the horrors of the Vietnam war.
Wizards is a film that could only exist in this time period. Ralph Bakshi is an animator that could only have had any level of success in the 1970s.

I love the 1970s, but it wasn't a very good time for animation. Disney had been going downhill since Walt's death in 1966, and they really wouldn't recover till the 90s. Warner Brothers closed their animation studio down and cartoons on TV continued to be made cheaper and cheaper. So up from the almost nowhere comes Bakshi and makes these extremely controversial "adult" cartoons. Then he decides to make a "family" film. The result was Wizards.

Okay, it's confession time. This is the only Bakshi movie that I've seen so far. I know, I know. As a film nut and animation fan, it's almost sacrilegious to never have seen one before, but I'm rectifying that. I picked this one because It's supposed to be his most accessible. You guys can probably tell me if thats true. I'm kind of glad this was my first one, which I'll get into in a bit.

Fist off, I suppose I should say if I liked the damn thing or not. Well, I'm kind of on the fence about it. I like the idea of an animated fantasy film. I like the idea of a kid's film that doesn't treat kids like they're fucking morons. Bakshi is a very intelligent man and there's lots of good ideas here. Unfortunately, it doesn't always come together story-wise. For a cheap film, however, the visuals are awesome. I know that comic book-like stills were done for budget reasons but they're really cool looking. I'm not so big on the rotoscoping though. In fact, Bakshi himself in the commentary isn't too big on it either. He admits that he went overboard on it, but says that it's really the only way he'd get his films finished. It does add a certain level of style but if he had the money and time to make a big final battle scene fully animated, I think it would have been better. Oh and about the ending...I really...didn't like it that much. It was too sudden. Bang, the enemy is dead. I know what Bakshi was trying to say, but it just felt cheap to take away a final battle from the audience. I suppose it's the Lord of the Rings influence seeping in. It's really all over this movie. It's indicative of how much influence Tolkien had on the fantasy genre, almost every fantasy epic would pretty much use it as a base.

There are things I did like about the movie though. It's supposed to be a kids film, but it's really not. No mother in her right mind would sit her kids in front of this but it's probably as family friendly as Bakshi was going to get. It's violent and Princess Elenore wears almost no clothes. (She must have been freezing, no wonder her nipples stuck out so far the whole time!) So it's certainly not a Disney film, which is great. It has it's own style (cheap as it is). I liked the look of the thing, but story-wise, it's a little flat. I actually did like the music, but it's soooooo 1970s. I couldn't believe they put disco music in a few parts. It does add quite a bit of atmosphere though, even if I think Bakshi over praised it in the commentary.
It's a movie that I think all animation nerds should see, even if it does fall short of being a truly great film. And the DVD looks great for how old and neglected this movie is.

DVD Extras
Commentary
Baksi is a very intelligent person and a great story teller. I could seriously listen to him talk all day. He's even interesting when he goes off on tangents about comic books and the history of animation.

Ralph Bakshi: The Wizard of Animation
Pretty much just an interview with Bakshi, but damn is it awesome! He gets into how he got started in the business, pulls out a picture of his animation team and explains who a few of them are, and goes into detail about Wizards and how it almost didn't get finished. I love the whole thing about Star Wars and how both movies were struggling to get made, but Star Wars pretty much killed any chance for Wizards to really succeed. There's a lot of connections to Lucas's film if you think about it. Mark Hamill is in both and Peace seems quite a bit like Boba Fett to me. Even some of the early concept art has Elinore looking like Princess Leia! Coincidence?
It's kind of sad that Bakshi says at the end that this is the only DVD interview that he's going to do. Does that go for commentary tracks too, you guys that have his other films on DVD?

Traiers and TV Spots
Very very 70s also. I'm glad they put these on here, otherwise the extras are kind of skimpy.

Stills Gallery
Maddeningly short! I love stuff like this and you could probably publish a whole book of art from Bakshi's movies. Well, at least we have the movie on DVD at all...

So...now it's time for you guys to put your thoughts down! Hopefully Blogger works like I think it does and you can just edit this post and put your thoughts right under mine. Oh and Justin gets to pick the next movie. Have at er!

Edit: Yeah, Blogger didn't work the way I thought it would, so just post your thoughts in the comment section. You'll get to eventually pick a film to watch and post your own review up though!

LOTR v. Star Wars

2009-08-18T19:05:00.001-07:00

Might have to agree with Randall on this 'un.

The best part of Sting of Death is...

2009-08-01T03:09:00.000-07:00

Neil Sadaka!

That song is going to be stuck in my head all friggin' week now...

Movies that need to be on DVD

2009-06-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

I think I've posted about this before on my other blog sometime but I'll go through it again just because I feel like it.

To start off with a neglected classic there's 1951'S The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. I remember liking this one quite a bit when I rented it on VHS when I was in high school. Why isn't it out on DVD when just about every other well known classic film is? No idea. The world is not fair I guess.

On the trash film front there's Neil Young's Human Highway starring DEVO. A Neil Young film starring DEVO, how could you not want to watch it? Well, I hear it's a terrible mess but it's got DEVO! I'd watch Barney if DEVO was on it. Hopefully with the recent re-releases of Young's back catalog this will get a shiny new transfer and I won't have to give in and pay too much for a crappy used VHS.

Continuing on with music there's The Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues. The story behind this is that The Stones told the director to film whatever he wanted which ended up being lots of nasty back stage drugs and sex. It was so bad that they sued so that it would never see the light of day but ended up compromising. It can only be shown once a year at a private screening with the director present. I think enough time has passed for this to finally get an official release, The Stones are pretty much all walking dead anyways.

Okay, how about The Day the Clown Cried? This is probably the most infamous "lost film" of all time. Jerry Lewis ended up having to pay out of his pocket for this movie when the backers pulled out but he never ended up finishing it. I guess he finally realized what a bad idea the whole thing was. Lewis plays a Jewish clown who gets sent to a concentration camp and is recruited to keep the kiddies entertained on their trips to the gas chambers. Yup, you heard that right. Somewhere in a deep dark vault in Jerry Lewis's home this film sits, rotting away. Supposedly all it needs is to be edited and a few other final finishing touches. It has been screened for a select few people. Harry Shearer of Simpson's and Spinal Tap fame said the film was "perfect in its awfulness." You know it would make a ton of money if it were released, heck I know I'd buy a copy.

I'll throw a TV show on here too.
Small Wonder. Never heard of it? Well do yourself a favor and look up clips on Youtube. It's so incredibly bad, it's almost a parody of bad sitcoms. And if you think a sitcom about a family with a robot daughter is bad how about My Mother the Car? Or that one about the Hitlers in suburbia living next door to a Jewish family? There's so much bad TV out there that needs to be seen.

How about you guys? Have you ever heard of a movie that you really wanted to see but you can't seem to find?

I have discovered one of the greatest webshows of all time!

2009-06-24T06:53:00.000-07:00

Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum - Pilot Episode: Part I

Watch This Episode on www.theStream.tv

Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum - Pilot Episode: Part II

Watch This Episode on www.theStream.tv

I also found Doc Mock episodes featuring Hands of Steel, The Video Dead, etc.

Across the Bridge (1957)

2009-06-04T05:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight on forgotten film theater, this Rod Steiger film based on a Graham Greene story. Some people call it a forgotten classic. Is it? Eh, it could be if it didn't have so many plot holes.

Steiger plays a German businessman (and British citizen) who embezzles 3 million dollars from his company and heads down to Mexico on a train to avoid the clutches of Scotland Yard. Once the train is on it's way he learns that he's a wanted man and realizes that when he gets off on the other side he will be arrested. So he drugs some poor fellow traveler, steals his passport and papers, and throws the poor sap out the window. Now he has a new identity and can live the life of luxury in Mexico City with his ill gotten money, but wait, theres a problem. The problem of passing himself off as the other guy? No, the movie breezes over that plot hole with a handy hard to swallow explanation. The main problem is that the guy who's identity (and suit) he stole is actually a wanted criminal in Mexico with a very high price on his head for killing a government official. There's also a sad looking dog that belonged to the other guy and won't leave him alone. And the other guy isn't dead. Pretty soon Steiger is stranded in a small Mexican town by the border, the local police won't let him leave and if he heads back to America he'll be arrested.

The main problem with the film is the same problem I tend to find with a lot of British films, an over reliance on dialog and distinct lack of action. I'm not the kind of person who has to have MTV style editing and huge explosions all the time but when you have scene after scene of people standing around talking it can get rather tedious. It's that problem that really keeps the movie from being a true classic instead of just an interesting film that not many people know about.

Things I learned From Watching This Film:
*Dogs are handy for keeping scorpions off of you.
*Never trust Mexican police.
*Love will not only get you arrested, it will also get you killed.
*It is possible to assume someone's identity by stealing their passport, clothes, and rubbing a burnt cigar into your hair.
*My new DVD player sucks. (It only glitched once, but it still made me angry.)

YOUTUBE MOVIE MARATHON!

2009-05-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

The folks at YouTube have started posting different movies on YouTube, and just today, I've found and faved a few I like. I'll post 'em all, plus my review of the famed...well, look at this list:

The Night of the Living Dead
Teenage Zombies
The Violent Years
Anatomy of a Psycho (I SMELL SEX SCENES!)
Dementia 13
Little Shop of Horrors
Death Duel of Kung Fu!
Screamers (a System of a Down documentary)
...AND MAYBE MORE!

Keep on a-watchin'!

Catching Up...

2009-05-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'm going to skip the other Abbott and Costello movies and the two Vincent Price flicks (Abominable Dr. Phibes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again) and just write about the movies I watched this weekend, chosen from Mr. Maltin's movie book in alphabetical order. It was quite a good batch of random movies this time:

The Abominable Snowman (1957)
I'm a huge fan of the Hammer House of Horror (big surprise there eh?). I had never heard of this one though and reading around the net, it turns out its a bit obscure. It also didn't feel much like a Hammer film to me despite the presence of Hammer regular Peter Cushing. For one thing, it had much too high of a budget. For another it doesn't have the musty Gothic feel that Hammer's later films had. That's not a bad thing really but the movie is more interesting than scary. It turns out that the Abominable Snowmen the explorers are looking for are really a super intelligent evolutionary offshoot of humans with psychic powers, or something. Yeah, it's weird and not at all what one would expect. Nice location shooting though.

Abraham Lincoln (1930)
D.W. Griffith is widely considered to be cinema's first true blue genius. He was also quite controversial. His most famous movie, Birth of a Nation, is revolutionary and a very stirring movie, but it's also sickeningly racist. It's not really surprising though since Griffith grew up in the south during the Civil War and his mother sewed cloaks for the KKK. What is surprising though is that his first sound film would be a biopic of old honest Abe. Maybe he felt some guilt for his earlier movie?
In any case, this is more interesting for what it is than as an actual movie. If you've ever wanted to experience the shaky way that sound was first integrated into film firsthand, this a good place to start. The guy who plays Abe is excellent but most of the other actors don't seem to know how to act with sound and it makes some of the dialog scenes really odd. It doesn't help that Griffith didn't know how to pace them out either. Despite it's problems this film was a huge success when it was released unlike Griffith's next picture...

The Struggle (1931)
The Struggle is a condemnation of prohibition and the way it lead honest hard working people down the path of nasty bootleg hootch and into ruin. It's also just about as laughable hokey as any movie I've ever seen. While the sound engineering seems to have gotten better (and they were making interesting experiments integrating background chatter) the written dialog is beyond cheesy. I suppose that could be in part due to the Hays Code, but for whatever reason it's quite funny. Another thing that's interesting is how shabby the sets are. Compare this movie to something like Griffith's massive epic Intolerance and marvel at how far the great director fell in so short a time.
The Struggle was ripped apart by critics and test audiences and was never publicly shown. Griffith never made another movie.

The AbsentMinded Professor (1961)
You may know this movie by it's remake title: An Awful Piece of Shit Starring Robin Williams and Dancing CGI Blobs. This one is better though, and in Black and White!
To be honest I wasn't too excited for this since live action Disney films usually don't carry the hallmark of quality but this surprised me. The special effects are excellent for 1961, Fred McMurray is great, and best of all: no Robin Williams! It's fluff but it's very fun fluff.

I quattro dell'Ave Maria (AKA Ace High) (1968)
I love Spaghetti Westerns. Actually I think I have an addiction to them. I don't know what it is, but they're usually pretty fun, if for the wrong reasons sometimes. This one tries to be a bad imitation of Sergio Leone's Eastwood films but manages to be entertaining in spite of itself. Yes the dubbing is horrible, yes the guy doing the Clint Eastwood impression tries too hard, yes the Spanish mountains look nothing like Mississippi, and yes there's lots of side plots that have nothing to do with anything but Eli Wallach is in it and...where was I going with this? I dunno. This is worth a rent.

Ace in the Hole (1951)
Put this one on your "need to see as soon as possible" list. It's a Billy Wilder film starring Kirk Douglas as a jerk-ass reporter fixing a story about a guy trapped in a mine to suit his own ends. I'm not going to ruin any of the plot except to say that the movie is excellent. And it has a crooked sheriff feeding his pet baby rattlesnake raw meat. Watch it now or Kirk Douglas with come to your house and beat up your Grandpa.

Across 110th Street (1972)
Ah Blaxploitation, another genre I can't seem to get enough of. This one, however, transcends the genre by actually being good. It's sort of a noir crime drama set in Harlem: The Italian Mafia Vs. Black Hoods Vs. Crooked Cops. It's quite violent but it's not fun violence, it's actually quite distressing. (Although according to the net, a crucifixion scene was cut out of the DVD version).
Things I love about this movie:
*The slam bang opening.
*The opening theme song (later stolen by Tarentino for Jackie Brown).
*Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch as the getaway driver (who comes to a very bad end).
*Head in a iron press! (The mafia doesn't mess around!)
*The ending (Spoiler: Everybody dies except the one good cop!)

This was an interesting batch of random movies. Next time I decided to start adding three from the back of the book to my Netflix list, working forward so there'll be a few Zs, just to keep it interesting. See ya then!

Scorpio Rising

2009-05-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

I don't know how I'd begin to review Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, much less give it a star rating. You'll just have to watch it, then read my ramblings under it.

Watch Scorpio Rising in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Well, much as I can tell, it's a savage montage of sexual innuendo. The leather, the phallic motorcycle tools, the sunday comics, everything hints toward sex. More than hints, it showcases it! I don't know what to make of it, and can't see what relevance the background music has. Any interpretations?

Abbott and Costello-athon Part 1

2009-04-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

The first four films in TV Movies weren't available for rent and because there are a lot of movies that start off with "Abbott and Costello go somewhere" or "meet somebody", thats where we start. Most of these movies are available in box sets from Universal, of which Netflix only seems to carry volumes three and four. These are going to be a bit out of alphabetical order as a result. In case any of you care, the two A and C films I was not able to rent were In the Navy and A and B Meet Captain Kidd. In the Navy was available on the first box set, which is absent, and Captain Kidd has never been released on any home video format ever. Go Figure.

Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953)

Mr. Maltin's Opinion:
*1/2 Stars. Unimaginative vehicle has Bud and Lou sailing through space with escaped gangster, landing on most earthlike planet.

Oh come on Lenny, it's not that bad. Maybe I'm just a sucker for 1950s sci-fi but I actually enjoyed this one a lot. Any movie that features a planet full of Miss World contestants and Mari Blanchard is alright by me. What really surprised me was the special effects, when the ship was flying around New York it really wasn't bad. Of course when it was taking off you could really tell it was on a string but it just added to it's charm. The only thing that made me mad is the title. In a blatant case of false advertising, Bud and Lou don't actually go to Mars. Would Abbott and Costello go to Mardi Gras and Eventually Venus have been a worse title?
Favorite bits:
*Lou gets chased by a giant small dog. Through the Looking Glass anyone?
*We have pills for everything. Wink wink.
*Those Mardi Gras costumes were awesome. I want one!
*Mari Blanchard, drool....
A quick bit of trivia: Anita Ekberg is supposed to be one of the Venusian guards, but I couldn't pick her out. Also, Harry Shearer, who does several voices on The Simpsons and was also Mr. Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap, has an uncredited role as a kid at the beginning. If you can pick him out you get a cookie.
My Rating: *** Stars.

Lost in Alaska (1952)

Mr. Maltin's Opinion:
*1/2 Stars. Unremarkable slapstick set in the 1890's, with A & C off to the wilds to help a friend but doing more hindering.

Well, I wouldn't call it unremarkable. "Quickly thrown together mess of a movie" would have been better. It starts off alright with a few good laughs, but it seems like the script writers ran out of ideas at the end and just started throwing random gags in. Lou gets hit with a boomerang and falls down way too many times, shoots fish at the bad guys, a polar bear shows up for no reason, and theres a song and dance number thats a total mess. And I really did not need to hear Lou sing. He had an alright song in Jack and the Beanstalk but here it doesn't seem like he's trying very hard. Imagine him yelling "HEY ABBOTT!" at the top of his lungs. Now imagine him singing in the exact same way. Yeesh.
It works the best when it just lets the boys do their thing but it mostly drags and the ending makes no sense. Oh well, not a complete waste of time though.
My Rating: A generous ** Stars.

These are supposedly the two worst Abbott and Costello films so at least I've gotten those out of the way. More tomorrow!

New Project Coming Up!

2009-04-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

In an effort to watch more old movies, both good and bad, I'll be using a very beat up copy of Leonard Maltin's 1981-82 Edition of TV Movies. This is what Mr. Maltin's yearly movie books started as: Books about movies that were shown on TV as home video was just in its infancy and not many people owned VCRs yet. Its pretty slim compared to the uber thick version that gets put out now but its still fascinatingly dense. And get this: I'll be attempting to go through it alphabetically! I've already got all the A's I could find up in my Netflix queue and let me tell you, its quite daunting researching so many films to see if they've been released on video, daunting but engrossing. Some will have to be out of order though because Netflix has a waiting list for some movies and quite a few got shoved into my saved slots on top of the fact that some DVDs are double features. So I'm not going to make the order in the book a strict rule. And yes sequels that come before their original movies will get watched first, that should make for some interesting viewing.

I've already come to the sad realization that a good many older films will never see release on DVD and many have never even seen the fuzzy light of VHS. Granted a lot of these are average time-fillers that no ones really clamoring for but for the life of me I can't figure out why movies like The African Queen and The Apartment aren't out yet and there's more good movies rotting away in studio vaults than you think. It makes me even more determined to watch more old movies because we're really lucky to have even those.

The book covers movies from the 1920s all the way up to the very early 80s, so I'll be writing about movies from just about every era. Should be a good time, lets see how long I can keep this up!

Weekend Movie Roundup - Netflix Edition

2009-04-05T02:27:00.000-07:00

Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001)
I've run out of things to say about this series. This last movie (number seven!) is just another stupid time waster, but since its the 00s, we get some bad CGI cornstalks. Michael Ironside proves once again that he's the biggest paycheck whore in the entire universe by appearing in one whole scene before vanishing for the rest of the movie. Couldn't they have at least have given him a death scene?
Other fun bits include:
*A retarded disabled man in a wheelchair who likes to curse getting pushed down a stairwell.
*A town with about 6 people living in it that has a fully stocked grocery store that stays open late at night.
*Ghostly Amish kids who happen to be good at arcade games.
*And the usual bad horror chiches living in a rundown hotel thats about to be condemned: The whore, the cracked military guy, and the stoner.
All in all this series wasn't ever as bad as I thought it was going to be (except for part 666) and turned out to be a good time waster (properly boozed up of course). I'm just so very glad I don't have to watch anymore.

Christine (1983)
I love John Carpenter. To me he's the best director of the 80s, having made the first Halloween, They Live, The Thing, Escape from New York/LA, and The Fog. Plus he usually wrote his own musical scores, which gives them a distinctive sound. Unfortunately, this is probably one of his worst movies.
Its sad too because there's quite a few parts that I really liked but the problem lies in the fact that when they cut out a major part of Stephen King's book, they took out a ton of the creep factor and character motivation. In the DVD featurettes no one (including Carpenter himself) even seems to realize this. Carpenter also claims that after The Thing he was getting flack for using too much gore so he cut back on this, his next movie. He cut way back too because there's none present. None. I'm not saying you have to have gore in every horror movie but its a silly film about a killer car, cut your audience some slack!
In so many words: This movie is flat like stale soda.
Notables:
*Flaming car. (On the DVD theres a good interview with the stunt man that drove it who almost died when it stalled.)
*Awesome character actors, one of which disappears for most of the movie and comes back to be killed off.
*Good John Carpenter score, as usual.
*The numerous deleted scenes on the DVD that really should have been included in the movie.

Hearts in Atlantis (2001)
This is another King adaption that fails because the screenwriters decided to cut a large chunk of the story out, actively killing most of the character motivation and suspense. Here they took out any and all Dark Tower references, changing the Low Men to government agents looking for psychics instead of the creepy agents of the Crimson King trying to kidnap breakers to destroy the fabric of the universe. Thus the signs that are put up all over town looking for "lost pets" don't make any sense and good old Ted being taken away isn't as awful as it should have been, in fact he smiles and looks happy when they shove him in the car! I doubt he'd look that happy if he knew he was going to be forced to destroy reality.
The film has other problems as well, including the yellow tinged baby-boomer nostalgia it tries to put forth by shoehorning oldies tunes over numerous scenes of childhood bliss. I'm sorry but no ones childhood is that perfect, even with the bullies running around with baseball bats. Almost every scene rings whimsically false except for two that I really liked:
The scene with the three card monte dealer who gets beat by Bobby at the fair and the part at the end where he puts Carol on his back and carries her up a hill. For those brief few moments the movie is actually good and you can see how it could be incredible if the right people were behind it. As such, its only a sort of good movie instead of a great one.
Another problem is the fact that the original story is just a piece of a larger narrative, a problem the filmmakers tried to solve by making really bad opening and closing pieces to resolve what happens to characters you would normally learn about in other stories.
I'd recommend this to die hard Stephen King fans just based on the fact that it includes the very first Dark Tower characters on film, despite the fact that all references to it were cut out. Just tell yourself that the Crimson King is behind everything and the movie is much better. Oh, who am I kidding, Anthony Hopkins sleepwalks through this thing, its not worth your time. Just rent The Green Mile and Stand by Me for two non-horror King adaptions that actually work and pretend this doesn't exist.

Re-Animator (1985)
Stuart Gordon is a sick man. A very very sick man, but thats why he's loved so well by horror nerds. Very few other directors would have had the balls to do a movie like this: a campy gooey send up of the Frankenstein genre with more sick shit and naked zombies than you can shake a severed limb at.
Re-animator is loosely (actually very very very loosely) based on H.P. Lovecraft's novella Herbert West: Reanimator which Lovecraft himself claimed was the worst story he ever wrote. Adapting a crap story, Gordon felt no need to stick close to any particulars so what you get is a blood soaked hodge-podge of Frankenstein, Romero zombie movies, and Gordon's own sick imagination stitched together with a ton of dark campy humor and slapped with characters and place names from the story. It should suck right? Well, actually its one of the best horror movies to come out of the 80s and a definite "why in the Hell haven't I seen this sooner" type of movie for people that love trash. And this is trash, but its high quality trash and to me thats the best kind. Plus where else are you going to see rampant cat mutilation and a living girl about to be serviced in her nether-regions by a headless corpse and have it come out absolutely hilarious? I'll still call Return of the Living Dead the best horror comedy of the 80s but this is a close third (just slightly behind Evil Dead II). Rent it now!

Whew, well, that was pretty much my weekend. Next up in the old Netflix queue (barring anything unforeseen) is the two Re-animator sequels, a modern silent film, and a satire comedy about happy pills. Stay tuned!

A Movie I Doubt I'll Ever See

2009-03-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

Centipede Horror

Oh Jeez... I could barely even watch the trailer for this one! A guy on The Auteurs called this movie SO disturbing that he wouldn't inflict it on his worst enemy. "And I mean it," he wrote. This looks like too much for someone even with as strong a stomach as me! Any o' you guys seen or heard of it? Have you got similar feelings to a different movie?

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (1999)

2009-03-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

This series has officially hit rock bottom.
The other sequels were cash-ins but at least they were real movies with plots and had characters with motives, at their very worst they were at least watchable and even enjoyable with enough cheap beer. They're stupid movies, but fun. This movie isn't fun. It's as far away from fun as you can possibly get. This movie is anti-fun.

By this point the idea well for the series had pretty much run dry, but of course they were going to make another one because suckers like me were still going to rent it. The had a few ideas, one of which was to bring John Franklin back. Franklin played the leader Issac in the first movie where he burned to death at the end. It makes no sense why he turns up here in a coma but thats the least confusing thing about this movie. (John Franklin has a growth hormone deficiency by the way, he doesn't look much older than he did in the first movie way back in the 80s. Its kinda creepy.)
Bringing Franklin back was a gimmick and thats all the writers had. They stole the plot line from earlier movies about an outsider stumbling into Gatlin and running into those evil children to create a framework for the story and found they couldn't make a full length movie with just those two things. So they did what any hack writer would do when faced with such a situation: They padded the shit out of every scene by writing in huge gobs of dialog.
"The plot we came up with is confusing and makes no sense, but it won't matter because the sucker who bought the movie will be braindead from all the talking half way through anyways," they thought. And you know what? They were right. I can't remember half of what went on because I kept blanking out. I haven't been this bored by a movie since The Howling IV and that ain't good. People who make lazy boring-as-shit films like this need to be punished somehow. I say they need to sit and watch their own movies over and over and over till they go insane or choke on their own vomit, whichever comes first.

Random Thoughts While Watching:
*This entrie's good actor/paycheck whore is Stacy Keach. Oops, he died already. Electrocution eh? I suppose it saves money on special effects...
*It's called Children of the Corn, so why does everyone look about 25? This is like watching the WB.
*Jesus, another dialog scene? How many of these can you have in a row before you turn your audience into drooling morons?
*Will something please happen already, my brain feels numb.
*Girl: "What is with all these damn birds?" I was just wondering that myself actually...
*Finally some action! Hmmmm, girls running around in wet t-shirts. Too bad its too dark to see anything. I hate these film makers, I really do.
*That head split was the best part of the movie. I guess they spent all their money on that one effect. Theres almost no gore scenes at all, which someone should get punched for since it was the best part of the last five movies. You cut out the best part of the series, why the frick would you do that? Because making gore effects takes money and effort and who wants to spend that?
*So Issac's son is He Who Walks Behind the Rows? What the Hell? Why is he talking like a game show host? And will someone please kill that "kid" with the stupid hat please? I didn't say kill Issac you twat!
*End, goddamn you, end! Why won't this end? (Sob).

I've only got one more to watch, I think I can make it. It can't possibly get worse than this. Can it?

The Roger Corman Collection Part 1: "Gas-s-s-s" & "The Trip"

2009-03-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

A friend graciously lent me their DVD player, so I celebrated by buying The Roger Corman Collection, featuring 8 classics. Here's the first two:

Gas-s-s-s:

***** (5 out of 11 stars)

Plot Summary: A military gas leak kills everyone over the age of 25. A hippie couple discovers that a group of rape-mad frat boys have taken over their home town, so they decide to hit the road. Zany comedy with a very loose plot continues.

Well, this would've been a much better movie if it hadn't been hacked to death by editors. It has some enjoyable scenes, such as the frat boys in training, and one hippy disguised as a priest. But those scenes don't save the plot, which more loose than The Producers (a much better movie which I should review). If only it hadn't been mutilated. Oh well, the other movies should be better...

The Trip:

********1/2 (8 1/2 out of 11 stars)

Plot Summary: A commercial director decides to take his first hit of LSD. Scenes switch between the trip and real-life as he struggles through being lost in the streets, searching through in a haunted castle, throwing laundry, and walking through woods in his friend's living room. Dazzling special effects but no plot.

I've never taken drugs, but after seeing this movie, I almost feel like I have. It's very interesting and watchable, well acted, etc, but it's no masterpiece. Some scenes are scary, and most of it is disturbing. It's just, a guy does LSD, and that's it. One of the simplist of movies, while also being complicated. Anti-climactic, though a strangely satisfying watch.

Part 2 coming soon!

Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (1998)

2009-03-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

This series continues to surprise me. It's not like any of these sequels are necessary but they've all been pretty watchable. I ragged on part 4 but it wasn't that bad. Get a some beers and a bunch of smart-ass friends together and it would make a pretty marathon of hilarious stupidity and pointless gore.

We're into the late 90s now, and since Scream came out in 1996, every horror movie since then has had to have pretty young people getting chopped up and this one is no exception. It's pretty much your standard slasher film with a few touches that make it more interesting, as well as a lot of overwrought dramatics that seem to be the trademark of this series.
He Who Walks Behind the Rows reappears (yah!) as a silo full of fire. (?) And B-legend David Carradine (Kill Bill) is the leader of the children for some reason. It doesn't make sense and its never fully explained but he does get a cool scene where his forehead splits open and kills a cop. I didn't really understand it, but it looked cool!
One thing thats interesting about this series is the number of up and coming starlets it features.
The first movie had a pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton, the third had Charlize Theron in a bit part, the fourth had Naomi Watts shooting a demonic child with a shotgun full of Mercury, and this one has Eva Mendes committing suicide by jumping into a possessed fire silo! I fully expect Jessica Alba to stab herself with a sickle in the next one. Maybe her death would ease the pain of that awful Fantastic Four movie...
This feels just right for a movie that would be on late night cable when you're hungover or drunk and don't want to think too much. It sure beats infomercials anyways.

Random Things
* What a kooky character, putting blowup dolls all over town! I'm sure he's going to survive till the end of the movie...
* Going into a local bar and loudly telling the bartender that the town smells like shit probably isn't the smartest thing in the world to do.
* Is that the kid from Step by Step? Possibly. Does anyone but me remember that awful show?
* For a rated-R mostly straight to video schlock fest these movies have been really stingy with the nudity. Five movies in and nothing yet!
* Oh David Carradine, you'll do anything for a paycheck won't you?
* These dramatic scenes are so boring! Good thing I've had three beers already.
* The say He Who Walks Behind the Rows about 50 times, by this point the name is actually sort of funny.
* Why don't they just kick the jack out so the car falls on him? Why bother with the lighter and the drill? Oh yeah, this movie is stupid thats why. Silly me, I forgot.
* The climax where the heroine has to drop a homemade bomb into the silo is kind of like the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Mount Doom, only lame.
* Demonic baby and...its over. It was better than part four I'll give it that. At least if felt like a CotC movie instead of a seperate story they slapped the title on.

Part 666 up next. Seriously, thats what its called.

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996)

2009-03-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

By this time I'm surprised they're still putting "Based on a Story by Stephen King" before the credits as this has less to do with the short story than the last three movies did. He Who Walks Behind the Rows does not appear (although there is supposed to be a deleted scene that connects him the proceedings its nowhere on the DVD). The film concerns an undead demon preacher child that is loosed from a well by a hobo, who apparently doesn't mind stagnant water sitting in an old barn, and starts infecting the children of a nearby town and making them kill adults to completely resurrect him, or something. It's up to Naomi Watts (star of the King Kong remake and the American Ring movies) to stop him.

The last two sequels were stupid, but fun. This one is just lame and forgettable. The killings are random, uninventive, and mean without the sense of humor of the last two. Everybody is sluffing it for a paycheck including the writers, the set designers, and the special effects people. No one really seems to care and if they don't, then why should I? Avoid like a creepy child with a scythe.

Random Stuff
* B-movie legend Karen Black is possibly the best thing here, even if she pretty much just walks through the movie like there's a pole tied to her head with money on the end.
* Naomi Watts has quite a pretty face, but can't act worth a darn.
* I guess dilapidated barns have old wells and modern day sprinkler systems. All I remember old barns having was mice and hornet's nests.
* Do city people really find old barns, corn fields, and grasshoppers scary? Thats the general feeling I got while watching this.
* A serial killer trading card deck? I want one! The kid says Charles Manson could have been a rock star, but anyone who's heard his attempts at song writing will tell you otherwise.
* I think if all the children in a town suddenly got high fevers at the same time and all their teeth started falling out that there'd be mass panic and government investigations instead of all the parents trying to get the bumbling wheezing small town doctor to do anything but bumble around and wheeze.
* Of course the police would suspect you killed your wife if didn't seem sad or angry about her death!
* No big shocking twist ending here, just a kid killing a grasshopper. What the hell did that even mean anyways? Stupid movie.

Part V later today. Ug.

Black Sheep (2007)

2009-03-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different, a man with three buttocks.

Sorry, that'd been cool though. This is, however, a horror movie about killer sheep.

"Black Sheep" (2006/I)
Directed and Written by Jonathan King

I saw this on the Sci-Fi (sorry, guys, it's now SyFy) channel a few days, and I have to say, this is quite honestly the funniest movie I've ever seen.

Here's a summary for a few minutes in the movie.

A young Henry Oldfield lives on a sheep farm in New Zealand, with his father and older brother, Angus. After witnessing his father's pride on Henry's natural ability at farming, Angus plays a cruel prank on him involving the bloody corpse of his pet sheep, just moments before Mrs. Mac, the farm's housekeeper, comes to tell the boys that their father has been killed in an accident. The combined shock of these two incidents leads Henry to develop a crippling phobia of sheep. Fifteen years later, Henry (Nathan Meister) returns home to sell his share of the family farm to Angus (Peter Feeney). Unknown to Henry, Angus is carrying out secret genetic experiments that transform sheep from docile vegetarians into ferocious carnivores whose bite can transform a human into a bloodthirsty half-sheep monstrosity. While trying to expose Angus's experiments, a pair of environmental activists named Grant and Experience (Danielle Mason) accidentally release a mutant lamb. As Grant and Experience flee from the scientists, the lamb bites Grant and infects him. The lamb then escapes into the fields and infects the herds of sheep.

Honest to God, this movie just gets worse. Grant turns into (snicker) A WERE-SHEEP!

I shit you not.

Doesn't this just SCREAM badass?

This is just a comedy, really. It's like Shawn of the Dead...but from New Zealand and actually funny for more than dry British wit. Lots of freaky shit happens, let me tell ya. YOU SHOULD SOOOOO see this!

Memorable Quotes:
Experience: You hear that? Sounds like somebody's sheering

Experience: You're a tree.
Henry: I'm not a tree. I'm a fucking sheep!

Tucker: If it wasn't for my gumboot!

Tucker: What about the sheep?
Angus Oldfield: Fuck the sheep!
Tucker: No time for that bro. Go go go!

Experience: I thought you of all people would appreciate efforts to deconstruct the colonialist paternalistic agrarian hierarchy that disenfranchises the Tangata Whenua and erodes the natural resources of Aotearoa.

[Henry panics while under attack from a sheep]
Experience: What is wrong with you?
Henry: Ovinophobia, my therapist calls it.
Experience: Well, what's that?
Henry: Just the completely unfounded and irrational fear that one day *this* is going to happen!

Henry: You fucker!
Angus Oldfield: Actually it was a sperm sample.
Henry: You wanker!

Henry: What's that?
Experience: Geranium: aromatherapy for uplift and hormonal balance.
Henry: Do your hormones really need balancing?
Experience: Considering I've been attacked by genetically-engineered monsters, jumped off a moving vehicle, been chased across a paddock, dragged into a torture chamber, pulled into a mountain of rotting flesh--yes, my hormones need fucking balancing.

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

2009-03-18T05:59:00.000-07:00

I suppose this movie's message is "You can take the kids out of the corn but you can't take the corn out of the kids." Yes, I just made that joke. I am not proud.

Eli and Joshua Porter live in a shitty little trailer in the middle of a corn field. Like anyone who lives in such a place, their father drinks and beats his kids. It's too bad for him that one of them is an evil little bastard who uses a modified hardcover copy of Stephen King's Night Shift to transform him into a scarecrow (thanks to IMDB for that pointless bit of trivia). Then they both run away and somehow end up in the city and get adopted.
It really bugs me that every movie that involves adoptive parents portrays them as rich snobs with houses full of breakable things. Do those kinds of people adopt troubled kids? Doesn't the state investigate them first to make sure they're qualified and their home is suitable?
Of course the first thing that happens is that something fragile gets broken. Then the evil younger brother plants corn in the old factory next door. By the end of the movie he has a small group of followers and its up to his brother to stop the wacky urban madness.

This really wasn't that awful, it could almost have passed for a bad theatrical movie. I have seen some really really terrible straight to video flicks in my time. After sitting through both Scarecrow and Scarecrow Slayer, I took the DVD outside and set it on fire. As I watched the flames consume the evil thing and the thick black smoke pour out into the air as the plastic melted, I felt much much better. Looking back, I probably should have just returned it and got my money back, but it makes a good story. Where was I? Oh yeah, CotC III: Electric Boogaloo Two....

The special effects really aren't that bad for the most part. The death scenes are suitably gruesome and we actually get to see He Who Walks Behind the Rows. He looks like...a Lovecraftian monster puppet. It was when this puppet swallowed the brother's girlfriend at the end and he cuts her out of its stomach where she emerges covered in sticky gore did I realize what this movie was ripping off. Skull torn out with spine attached? Giant monster puppet and bloody death orgy at the end? Hero and heroine both covered in blood and gore? By jove, it ripped off the best movie ever made: Dead Alive! At least the filmmakers have good taste.
I said the special effects were pretty alright, but theres one at the end that was so bad that it goes on my list of worst special effects I've ever seen. Its during the monster's bloody rampage when he picks the heroine up to swallow her somehow transforming her into a Barbie Doll in the process. I tried to track down a clip of it on Youtube but no such luck which is a shame, it really is comedy gold. Her legs didn't even bend at the knees!

The story is stupid with severe lapses in logic (how did that whiny little Amish jerk convince all those touch city kids that their parents needed to die?) but thats to be expected of course. It is nice to see a group of black actors in a movie that isn't a vile piece of urban comedy even if they do mostly die in really horrible ways. I'm rambling now so I'll just finish up.

Scenes that were actually creepy (yes, for real, it shocked me too!):
*The preacher (who looks so much like John Cleese that for a second I thought it was him and my heart almost stopped) has dreams that are just stock footage from the first two movies. His third and last dream is new, however, and consists of a bunch of kids with burlap sacks on their heads that kill two people in their beds with sickles. Its presented in washed out yellow color that adds a kind of sickly atmosphere to the scene that even the bad acting of the adults about to be killed can't ruin. For about five minuets of time, this movie was actually good, how about that?
*Theres a statue that comes to life in the church that was freaky too, but it was brief and didn't do anything.

Things I Learned from Watching This Movie:
*Amish kids play mean games of basketball.
*Young people in the 90s dressed like they were all blind (Arrrg, the day glow colors hurt my eyes!)
*An evil demon possessing a small child will shoot fireballs like Mario.
*When your spine gets pulled out of your body it will stick straight up and be six feet tall.
*Homeless people sure do love corn. Well, until a demon pokes their eyes out, then they like to eat black people.
*Corn tastes just as good raw as it does cooked. All those years of living next to cornfields taught me wrong I guess.
*You eat pizza by picking it up, folding it, and jamming it into your mouth. And it comes from Japan.
*If you and your brother sleep in the same bed long enough you will still want to sleep together even if theres another bed available.
*Getting cock blocked by your girlfriend's brother really sucks. (Thats the second cock blocking almost nude scene in as many movies, what the heck?)
*John Cleese isn't a very convincing preacher. (Maybe if he did the funny walk more of his congregation would like him...)

On a final note, the kid from the kick ass mortician's episode of Tales From the Crypt is the one that gets his spine ripped out here. This was also Charlize Theron's first movie. I didn't catch where she was though, I've read she's in the church and gets killed at the end. Everyone gotta start somewhere right?

I am not looking forward to the fourth movie tomorrow night but I'm in too deep to stop now. This one was better than I expected, so maybe the next one will be too? I can't set the DVD on fire because it belongs to Netflix...

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

2009-03-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

Don't you love that title? Most long running horror franchises have at least one movie that proclaims that its the last but then has several more sequels following in its wake. CotC has it in the title of the second damn movie! To be fair, this is the last sequel that would be shown in theaters. After this they all went like a bad girl, straight to video.
I decided that the only way to glean enjoyment out of this movie after the terrible first one would be with the aid of my good friend booze. After work I went to the shopette and picked out the cheapest scuzziest beer I could find, a five dollar six pack of Rolling Rock Extra Pale (Angry Video Game Nerd approved!). Five dollars for six beers, how is that even possible? The stuff seriously tastes like alcohol tinted water and I downed three bottles during the course of the movie and only got slightly tipsy and I'm a damn lightweight! Good stuff for bad movie night though, I dub it the official beer of bad cinema!

Alright, on to the movie. This one hasn't been released on DVD in the US yet which sounds weird since all the other movies are, but the distribution rights are owned by Paramount and they're huge jerks when it comes to putting out DVDs. Not that many people are clamoring for this cinematic triumph, but it should at least have a good home in the Wal-mart bargain bin next to Shakes the Clown and public domain collections of old John Wayne movies. I, however, snagged a 3 dollar used VHS tape from the Internet. Man, I forgot how bad VHS looks compared to DVD, its like the screen is smeared with Vaseline. Oh well, its not like the movie deserved any better.

Plot time (spoilers ahead if any of you actually care): A cop and some guy who's never identified stumble upon a stash of corpses that turn out to be the adults that were killed in the first movie. The children are taken in by a neighboring town, which makes no sense since THEY SLAUGHTERED ALL THE ADULTS AND LEFT THEIR BODIES TO ROT IN A CELLAR! Wouldn't they have all been locked away and studied by psychologists till they were middle aged? This movie is stupid right from the start, but its a good kind of stupid. Its funny stupid as opposed to the first one which was boring stupid. Maybe it was just the beer though...
This tabloid reporter and his smartass son stumble onto the town and the dad decides it would make a good story. The kids (who are completely different actors since its been eight years since the last movie) are still creepy and evil. They find a new leader who looks and acts like a slightly more expressive Keanau Reeves and start slaughtering the adults again, but more graphically and in more inventive ways. Good ole He Who Walks Behind the Rows kills a couple of newspaper men in a really funny scene and then vanishes till the end of the movie. The kid and the dad argue and then both fall in love with different girls who, of course, both get kidnapped at the end.
Then there's the Indian mystic who really serves very little purpose other than to try and tack on a stupid realistic meaning as to why the kids are fucking psycho. It's because of fungus emanating from tainted corn thats being sold off by shifty local townspeople, yeah, thats it. Makes about as much sense as the rest of the movie.

The death scenes that are spread out throughout the movie are pretty damn good. They mostly kill old people. The first old lady to die is the one from the beginning who was telling the townspeople that they were all fucking morons for taking in the kids. She said she was going to move away and take her house with her but all she did was put her house up on hydraulic lifts. She even stays after someone makes a cross on her house out of cow shit. (The say it's corn fungus but we all know what it looks like!) She gets crushed by her house which allows the filmmakers to put forth several sort of clever Wizard of Oz references. (The lady's name was Ruby and her wheelchair bound sister was named West!)

Wheelchair lady gets it next in what was possibly the best part of the movie. The emotastic leader of the Children gets control of her electric wheelchair by way of an RC Remote (!) and steers her into traffic where she gets hit by a Mack truck and thrown through the window of a bingo hall! It was pretty damn funny and warranted several rewinds.

Then theres the voodoo doll in church nosebleed scene, the doctor who gets it with his own syringes, and the final town hall meeting slaughter which reminded me a bit of Over the Edge, only with less explosions. So, yeah, the death scenes are the best part of the whole thing. Other than that its overblown bad acting that made beer come out my nose more than once and almost nudity involving a minor (she sure looked young anyways) that made me feel really uncomfortable. All in all its good stupid time and one that more people should indulge in. With lots of cheap beer of course.

Other Random Stuff:
*The scene where the cornfield kills the newspaper men was hilarious, the token black guy got his throat cut with a leaf and the other guy got a corn stalk through his throat!
*If you took a shot every time someone said "corn" in this movie, you would pass out and end up in the hospital after the first quarter was over.
*The demon god can shoot lightening in this one and manifests itself as stock footage from the first movie.
*My teenage years were just like this movie: getting invited to go swimming by hot girls in bikini tops and jean shorts, running through a corn field and almost getting laid before being cock blocked by a severed hand...
*The preacher sure likes to say "FORNICATION" a lot. Thats a funny word isn't it? Say it like a pissed off preacher, "The lord doesn't take kindly to FORNICATORS!!!"
*Our heroes ride off into the sunset in a Volvo after building a funeral pyre for the Indian out of corn stalks. In a dry cornfield. In summer. I'm surprised the last shot wasn't a huge wall of flame shooting up behind the car as it drove away...
*And the pointless Indian's spirit fades away as the overly theatrical score blares over the end credits, goodbye stupid movie, come back and visit real soon! Bring better beer!

Tomorrow we follow the series into its third chapter, now back on DVD. I haven't decided if I should attempt it completely sober or not, I do still have three bottles of shitty beer left over...

Children of the Corn: Story Vs. Movie

2009-03-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

From the cash in re-print book Stephen King Goes to the Movies:

"Sometimes the story is better because ones imagination is never on a budget. I think the written version is spookier because the corn is spookier. On film it just looks like...corn. Corn is never going to give Dracula a run for his money."

Well, Mr. King was certainly right about that, corn is not scary. The film makers don't try very hard to make it so either. Thats not the main problem this movie has though, the main problem is that it deviated too far from its source material.
The about 20 page short story is an eerie, claustrophobic, and very cynical tale of religion gone mad. The first half is concerned with a couple wandering into a deserted town and the husband's pigheaded insistence that they stay and find help for a kid they hit on the road (his throat was actually cut) despite his increasingly hysterical wife and common sense telling him that its a very bad idea. When he does find out its too late. It's very short but it leaves you with a crawly feeling under your skin. I actually had high hopes for the movie based on the fact that it seemed like there was more story to be told. There's a whole back story that you could delve into, as well as the future fates of the characters. Sadly, the filmmakers flubbed the chance to make a subtle unsettling movie at every turn.

First off there's the opening scene which graphically depicts the town's children murdering all the adults. Well, thats all well and good but now you've just blown the chance to let your audience find out slowly what happened, you know, actually build tension and suspense? They could have put the opening much later in the movie after the main characters have already figured out whats going on.
Secondly, there's the main characters themselves. In the story their marriage is almost dead but in the movie they're all lovey dovey. Despite Linda Hamilton (of later Terminator fame) doing her best, the characters are just bland and uninteresting. Another opportunity blown.
One thing I really hated was how weak they made the kids. In the story, they're out for blood, the outsiders don't stand a chance. In the movie's world the husband just waltzes into their church, interrupts a ceremony, and starts pushing the kids around and they don't lift a finger to stop him. These are the same kids we saw poison old people and shove a butcher's hand into a meat slicer in the opening!
The church and the discovery of just how wrong things really are in town was the creepiest part of the story, so of course its done all wrong here.
Eventually I just stopped being irritated by how lame and not creepy at all the movie was and just got bored, well before the bad special effects climax. Who's idea was it to make He Who Walks Behind the Rows look like a giant pink cloud anyways? In the story he slinks out of the darkness as a vague shape with glowing red eyes. I suppose that would have been hard to pull of in 1984, but sheesh.
And the "surprise" shock ending is so half ass its incredible.

Okay, so things I actually liked about this movie:
*Linda Hamilton really does try and almost makes her character better, but not quite.
*The children's choral music would have been creepy if used better, but it was still kinda cool.
*The opening was pretty wicked, I have to admit. The stupid narration kinda ruined it though.
*The kid that plays Issac. Damn, is that a creepy looking little kid, perfect for the part. Too bad it wasn't written better.
*I did like the way the demon looked tunneling underground, then it comes up and it looks like a light bright on crack...

As Mr. Horse would say, "No sir, I didn't like it." It was overly mean in some parts (the old man and his dog who were not in the original story) and not enough at others (I wanted the husband to get it so bad when he started pushing the kids around). Maybe I would have liked it better if I hadn't read the story first, but all I could think about was how much better every part of it could have been in more capable hands.
Well, thats it right? Certainly they wouldn't have made sequels for such a middling little movie. Well, if you were thinking that, you'd be wrong. There's six sequels to this thing. And yes, I will watch all of them eventually. I wonder if they go into space in the last one? Children of the Space Corn? Mmmmm, space corn....

Why Haven't I Seen These Movies Yet??!

2009-03-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, now I remember! It's 'cause my stupid Netflix flow is jammed because my DVD player is busted! As soon as I get a new player, expect reviews on some, if not all of these:

Has anyone seen any of these? Are they any good?

Weekend Movies

2009-03-15T04:50:00.000-07:00

My Netflix movies didn't come in time for the weekend again so I watched a few that I've had sitting around gathering dust. I got called into work on Saturday so that cut way down on how much time I could spend but I managed to get three in, which I think is pretty good. Here's some rambling thoughts:

Bloodlust! (1961)
Man was this one goofy movie! It's about a bunch of dorky young people that wind up on a island when they ditch the drunk sailor they paid to take them fishing (The buff one would end up as Mr. Brady on the Brady Bunch! He sure does suck in his gut a lot here...). So what would you expect to turn up to plague our virile malt shop patrons? Vampires? Well, it is called Bloodlust right? Sadly, there isn't a vampire in sight and the whole movie turns out to be a rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game, one of the most ripped off short stories/movies ever. Our hip mid-twenties teeny boppers get hunted down for sport by a man in a goatee and smoking jacket doing a bad Vincent Price imitation. He never kills any of them, which is a crime since they're all so stupid. He shoots quite a few of his own henchmen for being incompetent though. I wonder how he keeps getting them to apply for jobs on the island? Does he put an ad in the mainland paper? Henchmen wanted: No pay, room and board, must be skilled in human taxidermy and not mind being shot for minor infractions. Please apply on large jungle island.
The whole time I was watching this movie veer from goofy to boring, I kept thinking that it would make a great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. Guess what? It was!
Look for it on Youtube!

Things I learned from watching this movie:
*It's hard to find good henchmen when you're an evil old man living on an island who shoots people.
*I never want to hang out with anyone that says "lets have a good old fashion clambake!" un-ironically.
*It is entirely possible to trip over nothing and fall if you're a female in an old horror movie.
*If you don't have any ammo, your gun is completely useless. (Arrgh, club him with the stock you morons!)
*The problem with randomly killing your employees is that theres always a chance they could come back as zombies and that would really suck for you.
*Even really bad B-movies feel the need to make religious allegories every once in awhile. Good for them!

Funniest part of the movie:
For some reason this guy shows up in the jungle out of nowhere. He's dressed in rags, he can't speak, and all he can do is scream really loudly. It's never really explained where he comes from but its damn funny to hear him yell.

The Devil's Hand (1962)
A man falls in love with a witch and ditches his cute French girlfriend after a voodoo doll of her gets stabbed and she ends up in the hospital. The hot witch introduces him to a really lame devil cult run by a middle aged man with a doll fetish. That's pretty much the whole movie. The witch says the cult does evil things but it doesn't seem to do anything but torture its own members with contrived loyalty tests. Just don't get involved with the cult and you and you girlfriend with the cute French accent will be fine. If someone had told the idiot main character that it would have saved everyone involved lots of trouble.
Bloodlust was goofy but it seemed like everyone involved knew that on some level. Here though, it's all taken deadly serious, much to its detriment. There is much humor to be gotten from a cult that worships a god named Gamba and I'm surprised that none of the actors looked like they were cracking up every time they had to yell "hail Gamba!" I would have been on the floor.
I watched this one very late at night/early in the morning which is perfect for this type of movie. It's not too boring, but not campy enough to laugh at, you can just sit and let your sleep addled brain soak it in.

Things I learned from watching this movie:
*Evil devil cults are run by middle aged men with doll fetishes.
*Its probably not a good idea to get involved with witches who appear to you in your sleep, no matter how hot they are.
*Voodoo doll curses can be cured using scotch tape.
*If you're infiltrating an evil cult, its not a good idea to leave your notes lying around on the floor. It will get you stabbed in the head.
*Doll shops are evil. Wait, I already knew that...
*Gamba is a horrible name for an evil god.

Mo (AKA The Boxer's Omen) (1983)
This might be the strangest most bat-shit insane movie I have ever seen. No, scratch that, this is the strangest most bat-shit insane movie I have ever seen. Nothing even comes close. Leave it to Hong Kong to make a movie so messed up and weird, being on drugs would probably make it less so.
Plot? Umm...okay. There's this kickboxer who's brother gets his ass handed to him by a cheating opponent and ends up paralyzed. He, of course, wants his brother to avenge him. Pretty basic stuff. Then the movie veers off in a decidedly odd direction by having the kickboxer get tasked to kill an evil wizard to break a curse on his lineage and allow a dead monk he's twins with in a past to life achieve immortality. Yeah. There's no way to describe the experience of watching this so I'll just give some highlights:

*To kill the evil wizard the boxer has to become a monk. He declines because that would mean cutting off his hair. Later that night he pukes up a live eel, which makes his decision a bit easier. This is the least strange thing that happens in the whole movie from then on.
*Apparently monk training involves sitting in leech infested swamps and...I can't even describe the thing that happens with the jar in words.

You know what, I can't really describe the rest of the movie either. It involves lots of vomit, maggots, various floating heads, random nudity, a real alligator carcass, more animal innards than you can shake a liver at, ancient Chinese robots, an evil wizard scarfing chicken intestines then puking them up then eating them again....if you like weird disgusting movies you owe it to yourself to track this down. Like, as soon as possible.

Things I learned from watching this movie:
*Black magic is fucking nasty.
*Good magic isn't as gross, but looks like it hurts quite a bit.
*Katmandu isn't as much of a happening place as Bob Seger made it out to be.
*Evil she-demons spawned from regurgitated chicken asses and live alligator carcasses fly coach.
*Being a buddhist monk really sucks.

Dang, I have laundry to do still, I hate doing laundry!
I haven't gone to see Watchmen yet, is it any good? I've heard conflicting things...

At the Drive-in

2009-03-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

So I just finished watching a DVD that tries to recreate the drive-in experience by showing cartoons and trailers before the actual movie starts (kinda cool) but they also had a few "visit the concession stand" ads that were really cheesy.
This one is probably the most famous ever:

Then theres ones like this:

Ummmm, yeah. "Ready for your eatin' fun" is my new favorite phrase.

Check out these little blips of surreality:

That clip of the hotdog jumping into the bun was used in Grease, a bit of sly innuendo that slipped past the censors!

One more:

I wish I could have grown up when the drive-ins were popular (or still existed). Going to the sterile multiplex just isn't the same! I suppose watching two movies and a couple cartoons on one ticket is too good a deal, now we get to sit through several not fun commercials before the movie even starts because the movie studios are gouging the theaters for all they're worth, hooray for modern culture!

The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

2009-03-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a movie that made you hit yourself on the head and go "Why in the wide world of sports haven't I seen this yet?"
Well, holy dog shit son! This was one of those times. I am a huge huge zombie movie fan. I haven't just seen but own every 'Of the Dead' movie Romero has ever done, have watched Dead Alive more times than is healthy, went to the theater to see Land of the Dead when it opened dressed in homemade zombie makeup, and have gone as a zombie for Halloween on three separate occasions. Call me a obsessed, I just love the crud out of the undead. So why have I not only not seen this movie, but never even heard of it? This was the movie that first gave us fast moving zombies. This was the one where they first could talk and yell out "BRAIIIIINNNNS!!!" This is also the first true blue horror/comedy gore-fest beating out Evil Dead II by two years! Having never seen this movie was a wrong I was happy to set right.

I should probably summarize the plot right? Okeydokey: It turns out that Night of the Living Dead was based off a real incident (!) but the government made Romero change his movie to keep what really happened on the downlow. What really makes zombies, see, is a toxic gas. There was an isolated incident where the gas got out but the government was able to keep it under control but still wanted to keep a couple specimens locked away. Unfortunately, a few "easter eggs" got lost in the mail and ended up in the possession of a civilian who keeps them locked safely away in the basement of his medical supply shop. Keeping zombies that are being stored in Army made containers is not a good idea as we come to find out.

The zombies in this film do not die easily. In Romero's movies you could get off a good shot to the brain to stop them from eating you, but here the gas makes even separate body parts come to life when chopped off. The only way to kill them is to burn them completely but that lets the gas out into the air causing more undead to rise from their graves...basically the human race is fucked from the start which is one thing thats so great about this movie.

Did I mention that this is a punk horror movie? It's more making fun of the punk fashions and mindset of the time but theres lots of great punk on the soundtrack, my favorite being Surfin' Dead by The Cramps. I've even heard a soundclip from a scene used in a grunge album I've got somewhere, but I can't remember which one it is...

More reasons to see this movie:
*The opening disclaimer: "The events portrayed in this film are all true. The names are real names of real people and real organizations."
*Naked zombie girl!
*Half dogs
*Pissed off zombie butterflies nailed to a board
*Three words: "Send more cops!"
*Tarman! Tarman is the one of the coolest looking special effects I've seen come out of the 80s. It's really incredible considering the budget for this movie probably wouldn't cover the makeup budgeted to shallac on Tom Cruise for an hour of filming today.
*To find out how the military really handles tough problems.
*Did I mention it has a hot naked zombie girl in it?

So those are my thoughts right after watching RotLD for the first time. I'm certainly going to watch it again and its four or five sequels eventually. I'll stop gushing about how much I already love this movie and go to bed now...

YouTube: Watership Down in 10 parts!

2009-03-08T09:34:00.001-07:00

So, with all that build up, I've finished Watership Down. And my review is coming up right now. But first, I have a message:

Here are all ten parts of this splendid movie. See each and everyone of them if you dare.

I was going to finish it yesterday...but I couldn't sit through it.

Not all at once.

After crossing a road, evading a hunting dog, and escaping from a rat-infested cemetery, the band meets a rabbit named Cowslip, who comes from a warren of what appears to be friendly rabbits. The rabbits are invited inside Cowslip's warren for food. The majority of the group is content and grateful for shelter, but Fiver senses something wrong and soon leaves. Bigwig follows him, taunting, but becomes caught in a snare (this is a VERY blood sequence, as you'll see now!)

Fiver attempts to get help from Cowslip and the rest of his warren, but he is dismissed. The Sandleford rabbits discover that the warren is fed by a farmer, who occasionally snares rabbits in return for his food and care from predators. Bigwig passes out, still trapped, and after he is released the rabbits assume he is dead; however, he awakens moments later. On Fiver's advice, the band moves on with a profound new respect for the seer's wisdom.

Before I go on, let me say that the acting is remarkably fantastic! Great British actors worked on this one, and their work is simply astounding!

So, the rabbits continue their journey to find a new warren. They happen upon a small farm where they discover female rabbits (which they will need to begin a new warren). They are chased out by the farmer's dog and cat, however. Because as we all know, cats hate rabbits as much as anyone else here does.

The group happens upon the dying captain of the rabbit secret police (Owsla) who tells them about the destruction of their warren (like Fiver predicts in the beginning of the film). What follows is a creepy little tunnel sequence which I put up now!

As an animation enthusiast, I love this sequence. It's disturbing, yet also very artistic.

These aren't bunny sperm. It's simply the souls of bunnies trying to escape their packed in hell.

Same here.

"No way out!"

Then, of course, bunnies + no space= asunder-tearing ground.

Cool.

Sorta looks like a "Band of Brothers: Bunny Edition" cap, doesn't it?

The group takes in the wounded Captain Holly, and finally chances upon a vacant area, which is Watership Down. Here, they settle in with a new, splendid utopia.

Then, the group chances upon a seagull, who turns out to be quite insane, who decides to help them build the warren. For some reason, the character might've been 10x better had he been voiced by John Cleese. I say this because he sounds like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. "No mates foh yoo!"

The most violent sequences will be coming up next. So far, this may be a violent movie, but it's a very nicely told story, itself. The writing, the voices, and the animation are all lovingly done, even if there is bunny gore. It's a great movie, but it's mostly looked down upon because of its violent sequences.

But the movie does have a beautiful ending, for all its gore.

In the end, our hero, Hazel, dies happy as the Watership Down warren grows to a huge, stable community.

"All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed."

In the sequence above, Hazel dies, and runs with El Ahrai-rah, the first rabbit. It's a beautiful ending to a beautiful movie.

But even better is the "Bright Eyes" scene:

I mean does this NOT bring a tear to your eye? The people who made this movie made a great choice in putting up an excellent Art Garfunkel song. Sorta makes you tear up.

See this movie. Read this book. You'll regret it if you don't!

How I Spent my Sunday

2009-03-08T04:04:00.000-07:00

There are times as an obsessive cinephile that I have to sit back and wonder if maybe I'm wasting my life and if all the hours spent staring at passing images on screens is killing my brain. After spending most of my day in just such an endeavor, it is time for reflection. My batteries are dead, my eyes and my brain hurt, and I am a bit sick to my stomach. Here's how I spent the lord's day:

1408 isn't a bad movie really. In fact its one of the better modern horror movies I've seen. Instead of relying entirely on "jump out and scare" type shocks it tries to be eerie and unsettling with a minimum of blood and gore. It doesn't fully succeed but I applaud the effort. It'd be a good Halloween party movie, its not too scary but not so dull that everyone will fall asleep.
It wasn't very smart of me to watch both the theatrical and the director's cut in one sitting though. You see, other than a few minor pieces and an alternate ending, they're really not that different. After spending over four hours with John Cusack in a tiny hotel room, I was ready to just call it a day and take a nap. Unfortunately I promised a friend that I'd go to the theater with him so off I went shortly after. At least the walk over there cleared my head.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is a fucking awful movie. I really don't understand how the people that made it could have looked at a game where people beat each other up and decide to add a ton of pointless overwrought back story to everything. Nobody really cares about the characters in movies like this, all they want is to see some cool fight scenes and maybe some T and A. Jackie Chan's early movies were pretty much just fight and chase scenes strung together and they were awesome, is it really that hard to do? The fight scenes don't come often enough and when they do, they're boring and poorly done. The whole thing is just one big ball of suck and it felt like I was sitting in that theater forever waiting for it to be over.
And, and and and on top of it being inexcusably dull, its also stupid. Its not stupid in a funny way, its stupid in a "you die a little inside" type of way. I mean seriously, a rap song about Street Fighter playing in a club? What is this the fucking Ninja Turtles? There's also a Maguffin that comes in about 3/4 of the way through that has no purpose other than to be a maguffin that the characters kill each other for. I would have been angry but I was just silently praying to several dark gods for the movie to end quickly, which it didn't.
As I was walking out I noticed a guy in the middle aisle that was asleep. I don't know how that was possible with all the explosions and gunfire going off but he did it. He was knocked the fuck out. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he died of boredom. I think its entirely possible.

So I sit here and ponder, is it all worth it? Am I really wasting my life? Even if I come to the conclusion that I am there's no way I'd be able to go cold turkey on movies. I'm in too deep, I've been on the pipe for too long. Plus I've still got a copy of Return of the Living Dead to watch tomorrow. I need my zombie fix!

Some other pissy things
Why did I have to sit through an anti-smoking ad before the previews even started on my DVD? Was it because there were cigarettes in the movie and they needed to be socially conscious and balance out the good and bad since smoking is worse than forced sodomy in America? I don't smoke but I should start just to piss of non-smokers.

Never ask for a large soda at the theater. The cup I got was massive. It didn't even fit in the cupholder on my seat and I had to set it on the floor! I only filled it up about halfway since there was no way I was going to drink that much sugar water. I'd probably become an instant diabetic or at the very least have to pee terribly every 10 minuets. Not that I would have missed anything...

"Watership Down": the Salo of Animation (Part 1)

2009-03-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

When you hear the name "Watership Down", you don't think of adorable rabbits, do you? You sort of expect to hear some Space Marine screaming it in a badly written sci-fi movie, don't ya? "WATERSHIP DOWN! WATERSHIP DOWN! We're f@!ked!" But I digress.

And then you see the DVD box for "Watership Down". And NOW I know what you're thinking, "Aaaawww. Look at de cute li-wull bun-nies! (gasp), the little one's blue, OMG! I've got to get this for little Skylar!"

Now, you have the task of seeing one of the most disturbing movies ever made. Good for you!

Before I get to the next post, let me tell you that this film is based on a book. A great book written by a Mr. Richard Adams. In the book, a little rabbit named Fiver (last name Mousekewitz, for anyone who's ever seen American Tale) who has a creepy vision of the destruction of his warren ("I see...fields of blood!"). So he and his brother Hazel (snicker) decide to gather their group to leave to search for a new warren. However, along the way, they must beat a helluva lotta obstacles in their way: humans, dogs, cats, birds, weasels, foxes, other rabbits (from Owsla and the Efrafa...LOL, whut?), and General Woundwort. Who's he? He's the insane, partially blinded leader of a military group of bunnies called the Efrafa who tends to violently mame the members of the Watership Down community.

And yes, this was made into an animated movie.

With all this about the book, what does the movie hold?

Heh, you'd be surprised.

(next post)

Marathon Part 2: A western and more cartoons

2009-03-07T03:50:00.001-08:00

El Dorado (1966)

I love westerns. I really don't know why though, maybe its just that most of them are about tough guys fighting and shooting holes in each other. Whatever the reason, its my second favorite genre of film, horror being the first of course. Like horror films, I've seen a lot of good westerns and a lot of bad. Believe me, there is a ton of awful cowboy movies out there. This one is pretty good. It's not the best but its certainly worth a watch. What pulls it above most other westerns is the cast and the great one liners. The action sequences aren't bad either, but nothing that hadn't been done before. In fact, this is supposedly a remake of Rio Bravo. I haven't seen that one yet, sadly. I'll have to do have a double feature night with that and The Searchers.
Wayne looks a bit old here as does Robert Mitchum but it actually makes them look more badass. They even had to cripple the two of them to even the score out or they would have handley kicked the bad guys asses across the Mexican border! The scenes where they fight were awesome too, although hard to know who to root for.
Mitchum is one of my favorite actors, and I don't care what anybody says, he's always incredible. And John Wayne...he's John Wayne: The Duke, the original bad ass. He may have been a crotchety Republican off screen, but damn if he doesn't look cool punching someone's lights out or gunning down any fool that dared think they were fast enough to take him on.
It's a good western for guys that like westerns.
Thanks to Spitter for recommending this one!

Random thoughts (in random order):
*Hey, thats an Edgar Allen Poe poem, why isn't it credited? Pretty cool paintings though.
*Jeez, you'd think that bartender would learn. Hah, you got what you deserved buddy!
*That piano player bit is priceless.
*Mitchum sure plays a mean drunk. Hmmm, not really a lighthearted look at alcoholism is it?
*Oh wow, un-pc alert! It is pretty funny though, beat his ass Mississippi!
*That old codger is great. He's a staple of the genre, and one I love to see.
*Awww, that leaping under the horses thing was pretty cool, too bad it was kind of ruined by the dodgy special effects.
*You could do a whole term paper on how women are treated in westerns just by watching this movie couldn't you?
*Hey, he did switch that crutch around quite a bit didn't he? (IMDB points out that it was a continuity error that Wayne was actually making fun of!)
*Swedish accents make me laugh. Its a horrible thing to laugh at, but I am part Swedish. Does that make it right?
*Ed Asner was Mary Tyler Moore's boss. Just thought it was interesting to see him here.

The final five cartoons:

Cupid Gets his Man (1936)
This one was actually pretty amusing. A bunch of gaggingly cute cupids wage a war on W.C. Fields and Edna Mae Oliver look-alikes to get them to marry and have kids. Its more funny because of the un-pcness of it than anything else, but the Fields look alike made me laugh a few times. I dub this: Sort of not crappy.

The Big Bad Wolf (1936)
Holy shit! I watched this one when I was a kid! I wonder if the print looked this bad though? Ub Iwerks was an animator for Disney that ran away to try and form his own studio. His formula of trying to emulate the company he abandoned didn't pan out very well and he went crawling back to old Walt shortly after. Mostly all of his cartoons are on cheap compilations and because of this, I've probably seen most of them.
The problem with these is that they're not funny. They're not even very innovative for the time as the rubber hose style of animation was already old and boring when these came out. Plus Iwerks seemed to think that dancing animals equaled hearty laughs every time and he was sadly sadly mistaken.

Henpecked Rooster (1944)
Another Famous Studios Herman Mouse cartoon. This one is a bit funnier though, but not by much. The main joke is that women are afraid of mice. Har har. The only good gag is a stab at Bob Hope which a lot of people probably won't get.

The Three Bears (1935)
Another Iwerks cartoon. Blah. Thats all I have to say. Lots of upskirts shots though. Ub was a perv!

Tulips Shall Grow (1942)
Well, this is interesting. It's a George Pal Puppetoon film and its actually pretty good! In fact, according to IMDB, it was nominated for an Oscar! What its doing here with such a terrible looking print I'll never know.
I wouldn't show this to kids though unless you really want to traumatize them good. A cute little stop motion animated Dutch couple have their home and everything else fucking destroyed by a bunch of scrap metal goons called The Screwballs. It doesn't pull its punches either, shit gets blown up!
It does have a happy end though, of course and probably got a good cheer out of its war time audience.
Ah well, a good end to a disc full of bland junk. No banned racist bugs bunny or weird-ass Fleischer cartoons on this one which is a shame. I shake my fist at the sky and shout "Damn you Digiview!" and I feel better.

Tomorrow: Horror movies, a 1950s TV show, Something Weird, and a trip to the theater.

My Plan for "The Watchmen"

2009-03-06T21:36:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm really excited to see "The Watchmen" this weekend. Might it be a good movie? Maybe. I've been lenient of the late on my rants and opinions, and yet I don't feel so giving for my favorite graphic novel ever.

I'm not impressed with the way Dr. Manhattan came out. That's a negative already.

So anyways, here's a toss-up: I'd like it if Kurdt, Spitter, and I could do three separate reviews for the movie. I know Kurdt might wanna tear it apart, though it'll be sad, but I've always been more forgiving of superhero movies, bless my naive soul.

Hope you two will join me in my endeavor!

-J. Spumkin

Marathon part one: James Dean and horrible cartoons

2009-03-06T21:21:00.000-08:00

East of Eden (1955)

This was going to be a part of Burl Ives Theater, but I got bored doing that. He is in this one, but its a bit part, even though he gets one of the best lines at the end. This post is going to be all about James Dean.
It's understandable if you don't really know who he was or why he's such an icon. I was wondering myself when I rented Rebel Without a Cause, one of three movies he made before his untimely death in a horrible car accident. It only really hit me while watching Eden why he must have been so popular. In both movies I've seen him in he plays the same type of character: a loner bad boy who's really not that bad and could be turned around by the right girl. Thats exactly the type of guy that most girls would want to fall in love with. They wanted to be with him and guys wanted to be him. It's not that he's a horrible actor, I like him fine, but I think its the fact that he played so well in the roles he was given that made him a star.
It's really sad that he died so early, it'd be interesting to see how he would have developed, or not, as an actor but his death is probably what cemented him as such an enduring symbol of the 1950s.

I've never read the novel that this movie is based on but I've read enough of Steinbeck to know that adapting his work into a movie is probably quite a chore. The characters are quite complex and bad things are always happening to them. There's never a truly happy ending in any of his work. That said, they did a pretty good job even if several subplots and minor characters feel cut out. The bar girl that falls for Dean's character seems like she should have become a persistent character, but she vanishes after the first quarter and theres a surprising subplot about German-American's being discriminated against during WWI. It's amazing that this got into the movie at all (how ever cut down it is), as well as the way war is portrayed. There's the usual rah-rah patriotism but the movie seems to say that this isn't a good thing. The war is described as a mangler of youth that pulls young men away from their families. No one wants to go and Dean's brother, who's against it from the start, only goes after he's driven insane. I was pretty sure the Hayes Code wouldn't allow anything of this sort, but I guess I was wrong. They still wouldn't let anyone say what profession Dean's mother was really in though. It's all tiptoed around in quite humorous ways.

Despite some rather stodgy melodramatic scenes and over acting, this is still a pretty good movie, although most people on Netflix that reviewed it say that you'll enjoy it more if you don't read the book first. So there you go.

Some interesting trivia pulled from IMDB (Spoilers!!!!!!):
*In the scene where Adam refuses to accept Cal's money, the script called for Cal to turn away in anger from his father. It was James Dean's instinct to embrace him instead. This came as a surprise to Raymond Massey, who could think of nothing to do but say, "Cal! Cal!" in response.
*James Dean refused to attend the premiere party, which almost cost him the lead in Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
*Upon being introduced to James Dean on the set, author John Steinbeck exclaimed, "Jesus Christ, he IS Cal!"
*This was Steinbeck's favorite film adaption of one of his works.
*Director Elia Kazan got James Dean drunk before filming the rooftop scene between Cal and Abra.

Oh and did you know that James Dean was gay? Of course no one in the 50s did but it makes watching his movies a bit more interesting. In Rebel there's the kid that stalks Dean throughout the movie. In this one theres a scene where he's talking to the guy thats he's going to go into business with. This takes place in a locker room while the guy showers, towels himself off, and changes into his clothes, all while Dean watches and converses with him. Interesting indeed...

Cartoons:
These cartoons come from a Wal-mart dollar DVD a friend sent me called Mutt and Jeff: Slick Sleuths, Cartoon Craze Vol. 22. You can find a lot of these things around with usually some pretty interesting stuff. I watched half of this DVD and so far the cartoons kinda suck:

Slick Sleuths (1926)(Colorized)
Mutt and Jeff go into an old house to catch a crook named The Phantom.
Mutt and Jeff suck. I'm sorry, they just aren't funny. I've seen quite a few cartoons from this era that are pretty enjoyable and this one just seems to rip them off to no great effect. Everything just falls flat, even the typically surreal gags. To quote Bart Simpson: "Mutt and Jeff are not funny. They're gay, I get it!"

Westward Whoa (1926)
Mutt and Jeff are cowboys. Yawn. At least this ones a black and white print and not garishly re-colored so that it makes my eyes want to jump out of my skull and die.
Next.

Mel-O-Toons: Robin Hood (1960)
Yeech! What a horrible looking cartoon! Reading around a bit on the net, I found out how this TV show was made: They took existing children's records and animated them, poorly. I've seen some shitty animation but this takes the cake. I think they outsourced it to a Russian company or something because Robin Hood is spelled wrong at one point! I feel bad for any kid forced to watch this junk, I really do.

Mel-O-Toons: Christopher Columbus (Year?)
Ick, another one! This one is sort of laughable because of the bad history behind it, but its still a pain to sit through. You'd think that they would have tried to make these at least partially entertaining, like those cheesy sing-a-long cartoons you can find on dollar DVD everywhere, but no. They wanted kids to suffer. The bastards!

Cheese Burglar (1946)
I've got a DVD somewhere that has a bunch of these Famous Studios Herman cartoons on it, but I've never seen this one. Famous Studios cartoons were never that good, even their Popeyes, but their smart-ass mouse character is at least sort of interesting. I like the violence and I like the fact that it ends with all the characters drunk off their asses, thats about it. This was a horribly washed out print but these collections are always grab bags in terms of quality.

El Dorado review later!

Movie Marathon Starting Tomorrow!

2009-03-05T02:43:00.000-08:00

Alright. I promise I will make good on this one. The problem I find with doing this is that I'm a horrible procrastinator. I always end up getting started way too late and not being able to finish. I'll get plenty of sleep this time and start early Saturday morning.
Also:
Who's going to see Watchmen? I'm not feeling too good about it you guys....

Tenacious D in "The Pick of Destiny"

2009-03-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

"Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny'"
Released November 22, 2006
Directed by Liam Lynch
Produced by Jack Black, Kyle Gass, and Stuart Cornfield

I think a new turn for me will be doing old or new comedy movies, depending on how good or bad they are.

Before I talk about the movie, let me talk about the band: Tenacious D is a "satirical rock duo" made up of Jack Black and Kyle Gass, who are known for their acoustic guitar songs about sex, getting stoned, and meeting the devil. Tenacious D thinks of themselves (in comedy, of course) as the best band in the world. Jack Black characterizes Tenacious D's comic nature as an antidote to "the masculinity of rock", adding "There's also something funny about the macho-ness of rock. Like the bands that are the fucking hardest rocking are like, 'We'll fucking kick your ass, dude… with our rock.'"

How's their music?

"With karate I'll kick your ass / Into Tienanmen Square / Oh yeah, mothuh-fuckuh / I'm gonna kick your fuckin' derriere / You broke the rules / Now I'll pull out all your pubic hair..."

How's that for comedy?

I just thought "Lee" was funny because of the "Psycho" bit they do in the end!

Now, onto the movie:

Once you buy the DVD, you'll find a bonus: John K. not only animated a couple of music videos, but he also made this:

It's an animated intro, which, if you've researched John Kricfalusi himself, is just notoriously gross and awesome!

As a young man, JB leaves his religious family and oppressive town (Kickapoo, Missouri) for Hollywood on a quest to form the world's most awesome rock band. There he meets acoustic guitarist KG who is performing on the street, and begins worshipping him as a rock god because of his skills and attitude. KG feeds JB's fantasy by pretending to be famous with a self-named band ("The Kyle Gass Project"), and exploits him to do work such as cleaning his apartment and buying him weed with the promise of an audition for his fictitious band.

After JB learns that KG is actually unemployed and that he is living off rent checks from his mother, the two become equal, and KG apologizes to JB by giving him a brand-new guitar. They create their own band: Tenacious D, named for birthmarks found on their ass cheeks (JB has a birthmark which says: "Tenac", and KG has a mark which reads: "ious D").

Soon JB and KG learn the deepest secret of rock: all the rock legends used the same guitar pick, The Pick of Destiny, which has "supranatural" powers; a whole other level above "super". It was created by a dark wizard from a piece of Satan's tooth, as a gift to a blacksmith who saved his life from the great demon. The pick gives its holder unnatural abilities with stringed instruments. Infatuated by the prospect of becoming the next great rock star, JB immediately sets Tenacious D on a quest to steal the Pick of Destiny from a rock history museum. Along the way, the band briefly splits up when, invited by some coeds to perform at a party, KG decides that sex comes first in "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll", while JB wants to stick to the mission at hand. The duo is reunited after KG's solo performance at the party ends up in failure and JB has a mushroom-induced hallucinogen experience in which he encounters Sasquatch and cavorts with him through the forest (actually risking his life several times).

I don't want to spoil it any further, but I'm totally serious. This is easily one of the stupidest movies ever!

I've read somewhere that the guys were high during the filming, which makes total sense, because the story's kinda misplaced and plus, no non-inebriated man could write crap like this!

If you're a fan of stupid comedy, I recommend this COMPLETELY!

An Announcement from Phantom Spitter

2009-03-01T06:43:00.000-08:00

My DVD player is busted. This means there will be less posts from me, though I recently watched Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on VHS and will do reviews of those. Just hang in there because the Netflix flow is jammed for now. Stupid DVD player.

Movie Ramblings

2009-02-27T07:08:00.001-08:00

I'm too tired to sit through another b-movie. I'll most likely get to it tomorrow though. So heres a very tired me rambling about movies.

Most people take the idea of film for granted. Heck, even crazy homeless people have cameras nowadays. I think I'm really the only one that thinks it's neat as shit that we can make pictures move. I'm not sure why but it just fascinates me to no end. You can do things with film and animation that you can't do in real life. You get to see things that never have and probably never will happen. You get to live someplace else in another world for an hour or two and if the people behind it do it right, it can suck you right in. Movies really is magic. To me anyways, but then, I'm a complete nerd.

For such a relatively new art film making has a pretty interesting history. The earliest surviving film is the Roundhay Garden Scene which you can watch here.
It was made by a French man named Louis Le Prince in 1888. You've probably never heard of this guy and theres a good reason why. After practically inventing the movie camera as we know it today, he made two films: The aforementioned Garden Scene and a short snippet of traffic crossing on Leeds Bridge. He was on his way to exhibit his amazing new invention and his films when he vanished. He was seen boarding a train and never got off on the other side. His body was never found and today he's mostly forgotten. Edison generally gets the credit for everything but Edison was a liar and a thief. In fact he led to the downfall of one of the first true great film directors...

When film first started to get popular, there really weren't many narrative films being made. People were happy to see any sort of film so most very early movies were just of people walking down the street or coming out of factories after work. Georges Méliès (another French guy) changed all that with his films like Voyage dans la lune (A trip to the Moon) which is considered the first science fiction film. Moon is his most famous work and the one that was supposed to make him rich but he actually made hundreds of fantasy type films before that, using special effects that look primitive today, but were unheard of at the time. If you ever get a chance, track down a box set of his work, its fascinating stuff.
Unfortunately Méliès's story is a sad one. Before he could show Trip to the Moon in America, Edison's technician goons stole a copy and started exhibiting it themselves. It turned out to be very popular and made a ton of money, of which Méliès didn't see a dime. All of it went into Edison's pockets. Yup, thats right, he was the first victim of bootlegging courtesy of Mr. Edison (the jerk). It's sad to think that that money could have gone to making more films or at least saved the poor guy from bankruptcy. He sold his company and many of his film negatives were melted down and used as boot heels for the French army in WWI. A good chunk of his work does not survive today.
But take a brief few seconds to thank the man he pioneered time lapse photography, multiple exposures, dissolves, and he even hand painted a few of his films. If you wanted color film back then you had to paint every single frame. Now thats dedication.

I could go on about where the first pan shot was used, the evolution of acting throughout the silent era, and why The Jazz Singer isn't the first sound film by a long shot, but you're all bored by now and I'm really tired. Good night.

The Babysitter (1969)

2009-02-27T05:37:00.000-08:00

I wasn't feeling well and decided to ditch the idea of going to see every new movie that comes to our cruddy little theater. I still wanted to watch a movie, but I really didn't feel like going out. No one voted on which movie I should review next so I put them in alphabetical order and picked the first one.

So what is this exactly? Well...its a 60s sexploitation film that wants to be a hard edge drama. Imagine American Beauty if it were made in 1969 and had a lot more nudity and very wooden actors. And bikers. And lesbians.
The whole plot is that this district attorney is boinking his babysitter which leads to him getting blackmailed by the girlfriend of one of the bikers he put in jail. His daughter is a lesbian but it adds nothing to plot. It does add a surprisingly graphic (for the time) lesbian love in the sauna scene. Thats in the first half of the movie. The first half has all the boobs and sexual innuendo and 60s softcore porn. I think its interesting that for the time this was probably pretty heavy stuff, a movie that would only get shown in underground theaters. Now it would only get a soft R-rating. Heck, this is softcore compared to the boom in hardcore porn that would come in the 70s and that wasn't too far off.

In the second half the people making the film decided they wanted it to be a drama instead of a lightweight sex film. It gets bogged down by long stretches of boring talk given by actors that look carved out of wood. The plots not even that interesting so it gets kind of hard to pay attention too. Then it gets rather nasty, the likes of which were rarely seen till the 70s (again) in gritty grindhouse movies. What the heck is this film trying to be? I have no idea. It all sucks pretty hard but it is ahead of its time, I'll give it that.

Random Thoughts
* It seems like every B-movie I watch I find a connection to one I watched previously. This one was directed by Tom Laughlin who would go on to make the wonderfully cheesy (and popular) Billy Jack movies. I swear I've seen a few of the actors before too. Maybe in another bad biker movie?
* The rock band that plays throughout the movie is named, according to the opening credits, The Food. Only in the 60s I guess. I love the scene where they're playing and the girls all take their clothes off! Geez, they were alright, but not that good!
* The DA and the babysitter are sitting at a drive-in restaurant and they start talking about how to eat tacos and slippery hot dogs. I wonder how many people caught what they were really talking about?
* The babysitter's theme is possibly the cheesiest 60s folk pop song I've ever heard and it plays over a nudity filled montage. Only in a bad b-movie...
* I wonder if filming it in black and white was a stylistic choice? Nah, they probably just didn't have enough money for color film.
* The ending? Can you say, misogynistic? Hoo-boy, woman's lib didn't really take off till the 70s did it?

I got this in a drive-in box set. It's sequel, also directed by Mr. Billy Jack, is on the other side of the disc. I should get to it later tonight.

Taken (2008)

2009-02-26T04:00:00.000-08:00

Plot: Liam Neeson's (an ex-government operative of some sort) daughter is kidnapped in Paris. He finds out why and where and goes to rescue her. On the way he shoots, beats up, and tortures a lot of evil people, and destroys some nice looking cars and a couple small buildings. It's pretty standard action stuff but well done all the same. My main quibble is that the characters are kind of flat but there is a nice long bit of set up before the shooting and fisticuffs start so you actually do care about what happens to Neeson's family.

For an action hero Neeson is pretty damn good. He may not be the best actor in the world but he has that "don't mess with me" look that is essential to pulling off a character that can beat up anybody he comes in contact with and get out of any situation. Sometimes the things he does are hard to swallow but at least they're always entertaining. Gotta love a badass.

One thing that kind of irked me is the camera work. I don't know why most modern action flicks insist on making all their fight scenes so damn choppy so you can hardly tell whats going on most of the time. I blame the Bourne movies but its pretty wide spread. I want to see a punch land gosh darn it!

This is a good entertaining movie with a slightly better than average plot line (although it is still pretty absurd). It moves pretty quickly and is never really boring, even in it's plot development and exposition. Stuff blows up, the bad guys get their's, everyone goes home happy. Until you read what you missed because you're American. See, this is a French film released there in 2008. It was released in the US in 2009. According to IMDB:

"Some of the shoot outs, the torture scene and some fisticuffs have been shortened in length for the film's US release to secure a PG-13 rating."

Why? Money. The really brutal parts were all cut down so that the teenagers would be able to buy tickets. This leaves a sort of emotional hole in a few of the more important scenes. I won't get into details and ruin the plot or anything but lets just say the bad guys don't get what they really deserve as much as they should and did get in the overseas cut. See it in the theater if you want but truth be told, I'd just wait for an uncut DVD to come out (which it hopefully will).

A slightly amusing anecdote before I go to bed:
When the first trailers came on there was music and sound effects but no voices. It was for Fired Up (which I'm really not excited to go see) so it really didn't matter that much but it was annoying and I was afraid it would extend to the actual film. When the second trailer still had no sound (Valkyrie, which I actually am excited to go see) I walked up to the front counter to complain. There was one other person there already explaining what was going on so it turned out alright. What surprised me was the audience's reaction. Two people (me included) complained. Two. Everyone else just sat there and did nothing. No one booed our yelled or did anything. I wonder if it had kept going to the actual movie if they would have finally reacted or if they would have sat there, content to watch the silent movie version of Taken. My guess though is that they were waiting for someone else to complain so they didn't have to get out of their seats and do anything. Are movie audiences really that cowed and passive? If somethings wrong with the movie you paid good money to see, go tell someone about it so it can get fixed! That is all, goodnight.

Arrrrgh! Too Many Movies!

2009-02-25T00:18:00.000-08:00

I really really need to stop buying DVDs. I know there's an economic depression looming and I should be saving up for when the bottom falls out and we're all reduced to killing hobos and living in their shacks while we feast on their organs but I really can't help it. DVDs are like crack to me. I even have Netflix and I still can't help picking up two or three or four when I stop over at the local store/mall to get razors or toothpaste. So now I have way more than I have time to watch. Here's a list of the ones I have sitting around waiting to be viddied and written about.

DF (Double Feature): Ghastly Ones and Seeds of Sin
DF: Death Curse of Tartu and Sting of Death
The Child
The Boxer's Omen
Monster's Crash the Pajama Party Spook Show Spectacular (it came with 3-D glasses!)
DF: Rebirth of Mothra and Rebirth of Mothra II
DF: Bloodlust and The Devil's Hand
DF: The Creeping Terror and Terrified
DF: Land of the Minotaur and The Hearse
DF: The Babysitter and Weekend With the Babysitter (These aren't porn, at least I don't think they are...)
DF: The Pink Angels and Blood Mania (Not porn either, I think...)
DF: Single Room Furnished and Van Nuys Blvd.
DF: The Pom Pom Girls and Malibu Beach
DF: Scare Their Pants Off and Satan's Bed (With a pre-fame Yoko Ono! Not naked I hope...)
Return of the living Dead
The Fog (Original good version)

Which ones sound interesting enough for me to write about? Pick one or a double feature and I will watch it and write an informative and witty review.

Oh and I'm hopefully going to get to see Taken tomorrow night, Fired up and Valkyrie on Friday, Marley and Me on Saturday, and that stupid looking Mall Cop movie on Sunday to feed my sudden urge to sit in a theater and watch a movie surrounded by annoying people on cell phones.
I really need to stop spending money on movies but I love it so!

Friday the 13th (2009)

2009-02-23T04:06:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate modern Hollywood remakes. I've said it enough that most of my friends now tell me to shut up but Hollywood's lack of any real creative drive does piss me off. The thing that irks me is that usually they remake good films. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, and Stepford Wives were all classics that did not need to be updated. Friday the 13th however is not a good film. None of the movies in the long long long long series are. They were all entertaining in their own ways but none of them could ever be called "good" and if someone did I would look at them funny. Plus after Jason X there was no way they could screw the series up any worse. What, were they going to shoot Jason into space again? Therefore I had no compunctions about going to the theater and paying money to see this movie. (Plus I was sick of staring at my computer screen in my room for hours before going to bed, truth be telled) And you know what I got? I got a Friday the 13th movie. Nothing more or less, it just felt like another entry in the series: fun for awhile with creative kills before devolving into tedium before the big finale, just like the other 11 movies. And you know what? I'm fine with that. The only problem is that it starts out seeming like it could be something more...

Here there be mild spoilers
The best part of the movie is the pre-title sequence which is surprisingly long and almost plays like a short film. It does away with Jason's mother pretty quickly (It was her that was doing the killing in the first movie, Jason doesn't show up till the second) and then actually gets sort of creepy as our lovable Mr. Voorhees hunts down a bunch of college kids in the woods who were out looking for a weed garden. Ah pot, a staple of the series since the beginning. Of course they all die horribly (or so you think) but it's actually pretty effective, with Jason off in the shadows most of the time. Plus we get our first boobs of the movie. There were many many more to come, thank Rytleth they gave this one an R-rating. I will not rant on PG-13 horror films, everyone should know by now that they suck. At least they should.
So after this cool opening the film trots out the cliches. Every Ft13th film has them. Here we get the slut, the nice girl, the pot smoker, the horny nerd (I think there was one of those in every movie), the douchebag, the nice girl, and the nice guy who's just looking for his sister. Hmmm, who do you think is going to survive till the end? The characters are a little more flushed out than usual but not by much. How much more do you need them to be for a slasher film? I think the critics that were bashing this film were expecting it to be something it couldn't possibly be. Did they see the other movies? This isn't Freakin' Shakespeare for crying out loud, its a guy running around in a hockey mask cutting horny college kids up with various sharp instruments. You puts your money down and you gets what you pays for.

Surprisingly, this was produced by Michael Bay which would make this the first film of his I've seen that didn't make me want to set his house on fire. Er...I suppose I should say the first film he was involved in that I actually liked. This still doesn't make up for Pearl Harbor though. Not by a long shot. I still hold no hope for his upcoming re-does of The Birds and Nightmare on Elm Street. You don't rub shit on the Mona Lisa and call it a new painting and Bay should not be anywhere near Hitchcock. He shouldn't even be near Wes Craven for crying out loud.

So in conclusion...this really wasn't a remake despite the absence of a 12 in the title. Just go into it not expecting much and you'll have a good time. Go into it expecting Bergman and you're going to have some problems. And big time film critics? Stay away from slasher films. You're only hurting yourselves.

Bride of the Monster (1955)

2009-02-20T03:29:00.000-08:00

This is the most competent Ed Wood film I've seen yet. That really isn't saying much but it does mean that the plot is a bit more coherent then say, Plan 9 from Outer Space. It also doesn't reach the dizzy heights of absurdity that film, Wood's masterpiece, got to. In fact, this felt more to me like an average 1950s monster movie with Ed Wood weirdities added to it. A lacy dress and angora hat? Check. Lots of scenes with people sitting around and speaking wonderfully ridiculous dialog? Check. Many bondage scenes and mind bogglingly strange (and cheap) sets? Check check. Of course if you're an Ed Wood aficionado theres lots to recommend here, most notably Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi in his last real role. (Plan 9 had silent footage of him filmed before his death).
Lugosi is the best thing here, giving a surprisingly energized performance despite the fact that the morphine addiction that would very soon kill him was probably giving him a good bit of pain. The speeches he gives are almost touching. Goodbye Bela, you deserved better than what life handed you.

Do I really need to go into who Ed Wood was and why he's still remembered today after many many hack directors have been relegated to the dumpster of movie history? I don't think I do. If you're curious, rent Plan 9 from Outer Space and Tim Burton's Ed Wood and there you will find all you need to know.

Notables
*Rubber octopus. Allegedly stolen from Republic Studios and was previously used for a John Wayne movie. Unfortunately the motor that controlled the tentacles was left behind. Watching the actors thrash around trying to make it look alive is very humorous.
*Harvey B. Dunn. This guy is a B-movie legend. On top of staring in several of Ed's productions, he was also in one of my very favorite bad movies, Teenagers from Outer Space. Supposedly his real job was as a circus clown with a bird act, which would explain it's appearance here. I'll always remember him as Grandpa though, struggling to cross the street to help an alien named Derek...
*Continuity errors. An Ed Wood specialty. Look out for the vanishing pencil bit.
*Bela's hand gestures are from what many consider his best movie outside of Dracula: White Zombie. I had to look that up, but I knew I had seen those gestures somewhere!
*The strange ending is a result of the financier wanting the movie to have an anti-war message.
* Stock footage stock footage stock footage. Another Ed Wood specialty, it's not as blatant as it is his other films though. Gotta love that crocodile...er, alligator.

Quotes
"This swamp is a monument to death. Snakes, alligators, quicksand... all bent on one thing: destruction!"

"One is always considered MAD, if one discovers something that others cannot grasp!"

Final line: "He tampered in God's domain!"

Alright, I've got my Tor Johnson fix for tonight. See you all next time for more fun with lovable songster Burl...

SOMEBODY TALK ME OUT OF IT!!!!

2009-02-17T16:34:00.000-08:00

On Youtube, someone has posted the movie, "Salo", long considered one of the most disturbing films ever made, yet one of the best (it's in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die). It is based on Marquis de Sade's novel (upon which the movie supposedly only touches very few aspects of). I... am considering watching it. Look it up on Wikipedia. The director was beaten to death by a male prostitute before the premere (or as a Youtube commentor put, "He was beated with a baseball bat"). A guy in a forum wrote that it's the only movie he couldn't watch in one sitting (it was too much for him; he had to turn it off, then resume when he built up the courage). Somebody talk me out of it before my mind is disturbed and warpted!

If I ever watch it, I will likely throw up then post a review here.

A response from Kurdt:
Oh man, you DO NOT want to see this movie. Take my word for it. A lot of critics say that its an art house classic and all that jazz but all I saw was a bad exploitation movie masquerading as an art house film. The thing is that most exploitation films have at least some redeeming value. The bad guys usually get it in the end in graphic but satisfying ways but Salo is just sickness and brutality with none of that.
If you want to go down the road of disturbing movies, I'd start with Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave first. Those are just as disturbing if not more, but they're better movies. Even if the same critics that lauded Salo hate exploitation films in general.

A reply from Phantom Spitter:
I know I'll watch it sooner or later, but I'm not too jaded when it comes to exploitation movies (not so for comics. I've read some undergrounds that are appallingly nasty), so I'll wait until I've seen the nastiest of the nasty in movies before I watch. Maybe I'll read the novel first. I actually want to see I Spit on Your Grave.

UPDATE: I discovered that the whole movie is not on Youtube. Just parts 1 and 3, which are considered to be the very lightest and least disturbing of the whole movie. It's not available to watch anywhere else on the net, either. Oh well.... Hey Spumkin, you've seen it! Why don't you do a review?

The films of Burl Ives: Summer Magic (1963)

2009-02-17T04:23:00.000-08:00

Ah, the Disney view of the world: everything is bright and Technicolor sunny, the mailman whistles while he goes about his work, and even the worst problems can be solved with a little optimism and a few cheery songs. The problem here is a city family that gets evicted from their home after their father dies. Not that anyone really seems to be sad about it, in fact they seem to be more brought down by the fact that their piano has to be sold off. They get another one right away of course. And a new house courtesy of the daughter and a few bald face lies. Gosh darn it, its been awhile since I've seen a movie this sunny and bright. I've been stuck in the dank pit of horror for too long I guess.
Burl plays nice old Mr. Popham in this one and it's quite a change from his role in The Big Country where he played the crotchety old father who kicks his son and tells him to crawl like a dog. Here he tells lies to the real caretaker of the house so Hayley Mills and family can stay there, while all the while the only pessimistic person in the whole movie, his wife, tells him that its a bad idea. Is it? Well its a Disney movie, of course everything turns out alright.
And wasn't Hayley Mills just the cutest thing?:

Can I get a collective "awww"? Sorry, no group hug. This movie didn't infect me that much.
While Burl is the best thing in the movie again, it still turned out to be quite the enjoyable little film. Its really quite amazing to think that family films went from pleasant diversions like this to annoying borefests with CGI chipmunks eating poop and celebrities trying to be voice artists. Oh and the songs are great too. Gotta love the un-pc Femininity Song. It's obviously tongue and cheek, to me anyways, but reading posts on IMDB you wouldn't think so. People are just more sensitive nowadays I guess. Goshdarn it, take a joke!
*cough* Sorry. Burl gets to sing two songs here, the pleasent "On the Front Porch" and the wonderfully cheesy "Ugly Bug Ball." Being a Spum-head I giggled myself into a fit at the opening line of Bug Ball: "The little critters of nature, they don't know that they're ugly!" If you don't know why thats funny then you really need to watch more cartoons.

It's also nice that for once there's no odious slapstick. Theres a bit of tomfoolery with the token Disney dog that runs around the house mucking things up but its not over done. In fact he pretty much vanishes for the second half. Interesting, I wonder if he ran away?
So in conclusion, it wasn't a great film but was pleasant enough to while away a couple of hours with. I was actually quite taken with it at the end and a bit sad to see it go despite its overly simplified view of the world and cotton candy optimism. But what else would you expect from a Disney movie anyways?

Oh, and a bit about the stock footage. The big D did a lot of nature documentaries where they doctored footage to make it look like scorpions were dancing and ran lemmings off of cliffs to propagate annoying urban legends. Of course they couldn't let it just go to waste and here we get two montages of nature stock footage set to song! The first one is quite pretty, lots of forest land and running streams and some neat shots of deer. The second features dancing bugs. Oh well, at least Ives was singing over it.

Next time: James Dean and a planet full of walking carpets. See you all at the ugly bug ball!

Bonus:
Some other things here that you wouldn't see today: alcohol jokes, cigarettes (mentioned once), jokes about a crotchety old wench dying in a shipwreck, a pubescent girl getting her dress ripped off that comes off as innocent.

Bonus Bonus!
Hayley Mills meets George Harrison!

The films of Burl Ives: The Big Country (1958)

2009-02-15T07:43:00.000-08:00

This is the first part in a series reviewing the film work of the late great Burl Ives. Most people only know him as the voice of Sam the Snowman on Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer but he was a great musician and had a long and diverse career in film. Its time someone spoke up for old Burl.

This movie is epic in every sense of the word: the opening title sequence, it's cast of hugely popular actors, even the themes it addresses are all done larger and better than most westerns that came out around the same time. The most amazing thing is the cinematography. It made me sad that my TV was so small, the sweeping grasslands and towering canyons really need to be viewed on a large screen.
The cast is no small shakes either, when you've got Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston in one film you know you've got a man's movie before you even watch it. But who do you root for during the inevitable fist fight? (There's a damn cool looking one here too).
The thing is, this is a pacifist western. None of the violence is portrayed as being noble at all and in fact the whole thing was intended as an allegory of the cold war. See? I told you this movie's themes run deep. You'd have to actually be thinking a bit to pick out it's anti-war message though. I dub this "a thinking man's western." As Mr. Magoo would say, "yes yes very good yes," right before putting his hand on a hot stove.
Despite its almost three hour running time, it never feels boring or dull, every scene is great in some way and adds to the movie as a whole. This is one for Western fans to pick up. Mr. Magoo says again "why yes, you're right my boy, yes," and then gets hit by a semi.
But none of that's important right? What you really want to know is, how is Mr. Ives? Well, he won an Oscar for best supporting role and no offense to Peck or any of the other great actors but he really does command every scene he's in. The first scene he appears in, where he crashes the Terrill's party, is the best part of the whole movie. On top of that he gets the most moving scenes at the end, go Burl!

Alright you Ren and Stimpy fans, see if you can tell me what episode and where these quotes were used (or paraphrased) in:
"If'n you ain't the mother and father of all liars!"
"Teach your grandmother to suck eggs!"
"I told you! I told you I'd do it. I told you, but you wouldn't believe me! Damn your soul, I told you!"

The story goes that Ives actually saw that particular episode where they parodied his likeness, contacted the Spumco guys, and told them he would gladly have done the voice himself! How cool is that, he actually watched Ren and Stimpy!

Next time: from a Western with an anti-war message to a Disney movie with Hayley Mills. I told you he had a diverse filmography!

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

2009-02-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

The story of Manos:
Once upon a time in the magical land of El Paso, Texas there lived a fertilizer salesman named Hal Warren. Like most people who sell shit for a living, Hal aspired to something more, something better. He was quite active in the local theater scene and even had a walk on role on the TV show Route 66, but this was not enough. Nothing less than the immortality the silver screen would bring would suit him. He bet a screenwriter friend over coffee that he could he could make a movie of his own with very little money and after scrounging up about 19,000 dollars and hiring some "actors" from the local theater and modeling agencies, he set about making his dreams come true. And he cast himself in the lead role, natch.
The movie, then called The Lodge of Sins, was filmed using a 16 mm Bell & Howell camera, probably the cheapest Warren could find. Even by 1966 standards the camera was an ancient piece of junk. For one thing, it couldn't record sound, all of the dialog and sound effects had to be dubbed in later, a fact that Warren failed to alert most of the cast to. For another thing, it was a crank camera that could only film for about 30 seconds. This partially accounts for the amazingly choppy editing present throughout the whole film, but only partially.
Other problems soon began to present themselves. One of the actresses broke her leg while filming and thus all of her scenes feature her sitting in a car making out with her boyfriend, scenes that have nothing to do with the rest of the picture.
Despite having no idea what he was doing, Warren proved to be quite the cruel taskmaster, demanding that scenes be done over and over and generally making the lives of the cast and crew miserable. As the filming dragged on and on, they started to make fun of him behind his back, calling the film Mangos: The Cans of Fruit.
For some reason, possibly because he had no idea how, all of the night scenes were actually filmed at night instead of the usual day for night filming. Thus characters run in and out of big circles of light and huge moths flutter by, attracted by the light.
Despite the difficulties, Warren did get his film finished and had a gala premiere at the Capri Theater in El Paso. A locally made film was a huge event back then and even the mayor showed up. To make the event even more high class Warren arranged for limousines to pick up the cast and drive them to the theater. Unfortunately, he could only afford one. The limo would pick one of them up, drop them off, and drive back around the block to pick another one up.
So Warren sat in the theater happy as a clam, his dream finally realized up on the big screen. The lights went down, and the screen lit up. And the crowd started to giggle. Then they started to laugh. The thing wasn't even halfway over before the whole theater was in an uproar, guffawing and throwing things at the screen. Before it was over Warren and the rest of the cast snuck out of the theater and went home.
The film was shelved and forgotten till it showed up in the 90s on a TV show called Mystery Science Theater 3000, where a man named Joel and his puppet robots ripped the film apart with their snarky comments. The episode was deemed one of the best ever and saved the film from obscurity, helping it become a cult classic in the process. Quentin Tarantino even owns a 35Mmm copy and claims that it's his favorite comedy film.
Whats the lesson here? Well, I guess it's that if you try hard enough and are a big enough jerk you can make your dreams come true. But not always in the way you intend...

Manos Trivia
*The crew was told they would be paid on the profits the film brought in at the theaters. Unfortunately, it made no money, and thus no one got paid. In fact the only one that reportedly received any compensation was little Jackey Neyman and one of the films Dobermans. Jackey got a bike and the dog got a bag of food.
*All of the voices and sound effects were dubbed in post production, with just two people. Sometimes there's two people talking in one scene and they use the same voice! Also, the little girl's voice is dubbed by a full grown woman trying to sound like a little girl. When poor Jackey heard the dubbed in voice for the first time, she cried!
*John Reynolds character Torgo, the most memorable part of the movie, was supposed to be a satyr (half man half goat). Appliances were made for his legs to make them look goat-like but Reynolds reportedly wore them wrong causing him great pain, leading to an addiction to painkillers, and creating the very funny Torgo walk. He was also supposed to be wearing hooves but you can clearly see boots on his feet:

Reynolds later committed suicide. If this was Manos related or not is still up for debate...
*Both Manos and Troll 2 have driving scenes where a family sings Row Your Boat. Coincidence?
* If you look closely in one of the makeout scenes, you can see something flash by the right side of the screen. If you pause, you can clearly see that this is a clapboard. Clapboards are used to synch up sound with video. The camera Hal was using couldn't record sound. If you didn't think already that Warren had no idea what he was doing...
*(SPOILER!) At the end of the movie, the little girl becomes one of the master's wives. One woman was so angry at this that she whomped Warren on the head with her purse!
* The rattlesnake that appears towards the end of the film is stolen footage from a Disney documentary. And if you look closely, its sitting on a purple carpet!
* The opening driving sequences, that go on and on and on, were originally supposed to have credits over them. For some reason they were left out.
* Reportedly, if a day of shooting was going particularly bad, Warren would tell everyone that the goofups would be fixed by "the magic of Hollywood." None of them were...
* "Manos" is Spanish for "Hands". Thus the title is literally, Hands: The Hands of Fate. This says a lot about the film in general.

The Quotes of Fate
The great Torgo speaks:
"I am Torgo. I take care of the place while the Master is away."
"There is no way out of here. It'll be dark soon. There is no way out of here."
"You were his first wife, but he's grown sick of you. He doesn't want you any more, I don't even want you anymore!"
"The master would not approve!"

The Master's wives argue:
"the woman is all we want! The others must die! They ALL must die! We do not even want the woman!"
"Find them! They must not escape, find them!
"No! Leave them alone! We cannot kill a child!"

The local fuzz shows us what to say to get teenagers to stop making out by the side of the road:
"Well, whatever it is you're *not* doing, go *don't* do it somewhere else!"

Final Manos thoughts:
Classic classic bad movie. I still don't think its the worst ever made, but it's darn close. There's a video of a guy dressed as Torgo walking around at Comic-con. He even had an I-pod in his pocket to play "the haunting Torgo's theme" as he walked! I'm going as Torgo for halloween. I'll knock on the door and go "Give me candy, the master would approve. The master would approve of you giving me candy!"

Bonus!
Worst movie ever party night suggestions:
Manos
Troll 2
Turkish Star Wars
Monster a Go-Go
Lots and lots of beer!

Slayer: "War at the Warfield"

2009-02-11T15:55:00.000-08:00

Here's another thrash metal concert album. And this one's actually worth watchin'!

SLAYER: War at the Warfield (2003)
American Recordings
Produced by Anthony Bongiovi
Runtime: 1:26:11

This time around, I've been able to see the whole thing through. And the first thing I noticed about it was that...

Unlike "Some Kind of Monster", this was a manly concert video! No pussy psychiatrists here, oh no! No surfboards or dirtbikes or ponytails or "searchin' for donuts" here! Nah, this was a man's man's man's man's movie!

Other than that, it's also a solid concert movie. This is like every other except that it's SLAYER! The ultimate thrash metal band, Slayer's ready to rock when they start off with the pounding rhythm of Disciple, pounding away at your mind with "GOD HATES US ALL! GOD HATES US ALL!" From beginning to end, pure metal! WHOOOOO!!!!

All that aside, it's a great film for Slayer fans. It's chocked full of interviews to keep your little dittoheads appeased.

But, I will say this: Slayer's aging. Tom Araya just can't hit those high notes for "Postmortem" or "Angel of Death" anymore. This was in 2003, and now, in 2004, he can't even sing 'em. Not just that, he looks like Osama Bin Laden now. But that's another story for Spum-Blog.

EXTRAS:
This has some great extras. The menus are basic, but you get some great stuff: there' s a still gallery from their 2001 tour, the music video for "Bloodline" from Dracula 2000 (review coming later) and a 50 minute documentary called "Fans Rule", which is basically stuffed with redneck idiot goodness!

The documentary, presented in full screen, is mostly fan-dominated, with interviews with the Mensa candidates outside of Slayer shows. Some of them make idiots of themselves, while others are just hilarious. There was this one guy with short hair and dressed in a sweater and Dockers, who looks like he should be at a Mariah Carey concert. He's smashed out of his mind, babbling on in drunken wisdom and even chews up a beer can. Priceless.

Even better is the father who took his 11-year-old son to the concert. That's one way to keep them away from Stained or Good Charlotte.

All in all, it's a good film for Slayer fans. Other than some MTV style camera cuts, you'll probably love it.

3.5/5

Stuff

2009-02-11T03:11:00.001-08:00

Thank you to my cohorts in crime for their posts! I'm pretty sure we're the only ones who read this blog, but it's all good.
It's been a very long and tiring week for me and I haven't watched many movies. This weekend, however, I plan on doing a write up of a certain infamous movie that begins with Manos and ends with The Hands of Fate. I've never seen a full unedited version of fertilizer salesman Hal Warren's jaw droppingly incompetent film, so this should be interesting (or a whole bucket load of pain). I'll also dig up some of the back story as to how it got made as it's actually more interesting than the film itself.
Torgo says: You can all stay here, the master approves!

Metallica: "Some Kind of Monster"

2009-02-10T15:45:00.000-08:00

I figure I'd start off my new role in Kurdt's movie review blog with an abysmal documentary that not only features a name to match what it truly is, but also a documentary about the fall of one of my favorite bands of all time, you guessed it...

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Originally released in 2004, Paramount Pictures
Directed and produced by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Starring Metallica (James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett)
Runtime: 141 Minutes

I'd like to start this review with a shot from their trailer:

It's true. This is more than a music documentary.

"It's the making of an album,
and the unmaking of a band."

I can set up the story just using the trailer.

This band was at its crossroads: its best years were behind them, and now they have kids of their own. Their struggling with their innermost demons, and after years of grappling with his addiction, James Hetfield abruptly checks himself into rehab, leaving Lar$ UlRICH and that mouth-breathing producer/slave Bob Rock to wonder if the band has a future. And, like a phoenix rises out of its ashes, Metallica realizes its own mortality and comes back with a solid, emotional album which comes back roaring with intensity, fury, and anger...

and then I saw the film itself!

Lines from James and Lars like "Metallica is, to some people, a friend. To me, it's been a beast", or the heavy hitting, drop-dead-emotional-power of "I just feel, so, disrespected." You can sense the very emotion dripping from Lars' pores as he screams "FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!" into a microphone.

But, don't think that James isn't having as much of a hard time when he comes back with, "I'm not enjoying being, IN the room with you playing."

Hell, watch the trailer itself!

This has to be the sappiest movie I've ever seen, and coming from a kid who's forcibly sat through many a Disney sequel. The image of this movie as an "eye-opening experience which brought a band back from its crypt" is just that over-saturated crap you'd expect from a psychiatrist. It's just two men (one an incredibly short, blond-haired Dane and the other...James Hetfield) duking it out in what could be the biggest control freak battle in history. It's lame.

To match this, we see Kirk Hammett surfing. Yes. Kirk Hammett, metal-god ripping guitarist, is on a surfboard. It shows the other guys' hobbies, too. It doesn't say "We're breaking apart at the seems" (well, sort of) as much as it now says, "We have other hobbies...ya know, if this shit doesn't work out!"

There are some other aspects to this movie, I'm sure. But it's the same emotional CRAP as you'd see on a Vh1 special: Band breaking up, singer getting over addiction, we see that band members have cute little kids, band snaps, vocalist goes into rehab, band wonders about its survival, vocalist comes back, big happy reunion, band stronger than ever, and then they make their new album. YAY!

The only difference is that the "new album" (which was ST. Anger) sucked, and we had to wait another 4 years to see them get their shit back together.

So, like the song goes, "You flush it out, you flush it out", with a 2 out of 5.

Oh, and bonus! Emotional quotes from our favorite bandmates!

Lars Ulrich: Hey it's Lars from Metallica. I'm about to stick 50 grand up your ass...
James Hetfield: ...One dollar at a time.

Lars Ulrich: [shouts] Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!
Bob Rock: I want four of them. Do it again.

Lars Ulrich: That's a shit sandwich.

Lars Ulrich: [singing with the riff] Searchin' for doughnuts, I'm searchin' for doughnuts.

Kirk Hammett: So what's Jason's role in all this?
James Hetfield: What? Who?
Marc Reiter: OK, fine, I mean... But I don't think Jason has any role.
Cliff Burnstein: He lost his icon status when he left Metallica.

Concert Movies

2009-02-10T01:25:00.000-08:00

How many of you have seen one of these? I mean an actual concert that was filmed and shown in theaters? That awful spawn of Satan called Hannah Montana does not count. I haven't actually seen any in the theaters but I have a few favorites you should should seek out and play on your TV with the sound turned way up.

Gimmie Shelter
You want a disturbing movie? Then check out this documentary on the Rolling Stones ill fated Altamont Speedway concert which ended with several people in the hospital and one person dead as a result of someone's brilliant idea to hire The Hell's Angels as stage security. This isn't so much a concert movie as a real life horror movie that unfolds before your eyes, incredibly unnerving but hard to look away from.
The music is all great though, Tina Turner and Jefferson Airplane both turn up. (Tina Turner was smokin' when she was young!)

Stop Making Sense
The Talking Heads were never a typical band and so it goes without saying that their concert movie wouldn't be typical either and it's not. In fact its damned near a work of art as well as a showcase for an incredible band at their peak. Even if you've never heard any Head's songs seek this one out. It made a fan out of me!

Let There Be Rock
A little story goes along with this one. When I was a young lad, with my musical taste still in development, a friend of my dad let him borrow a grocery store bag full of rock and roll VHS tapes, which I very quickly stole for myself. Most of them were hilariously cheesy 80s hair band crud but there was also this AC/DC movie and a couple Skid Row tour vids. (I still love Skid Row, I think they were a very underrated band, but I won't get into that). I'll just say that this one rocked my socks right off. This is another great showcase for a band at their best. The interviews feel really fake, outside of a strangely prophetic one from the soon to be dead Bon Scott, but once I heard the live versions of Whole Lotta Rosie and The Jack, I really didn't mind them at all.
The only problem with this movie is that, for some strange reason it isn't available on DVD! I'd love to see this one again. DVD gods, hear my prayers! Release this and a new restored version of Greed and I'll be a happy film nerd. Oh and the rest of Orson Well's filmography if you're not too busy...

Yet to see:
Woodstock
The Song Remains the Same
Sweet Toronto
Monterey Pop

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Using the 11-star rating system)

2009-02-09T09:16:00.000-08:00

*********** (11 stars) Must-see
This is the most disturbing movie I have ever seen. Moreso than that random student film crap that shocks people for no reason. Every scene is grotesque, some even horrific. Right down to the haunting last shot... Maybe the best movie I've seen all year, and that's saying a lot.
My reviews never reveal the plot. I like to keep the story fresh for the people who plan on watching it. I will say Bette Davis was oscar-nominated for this movie (to Joan Crawford's disgust and resentment).

News!

2009-02-09T05:11:00.001-08:00

Invites have been sent to Phantom Spitter and Spumkin! (Got your's from your profile, Spumkin). Check your emails! Anyone else that just happens to be reading this want to post here?
Email me at youngmancane_13@hotmail.com

Where Have I Seen This Plot Before?

2009-02-09T02:45:00.000-08:00

Color Me Blood Red (1965)

Oh forgive me gore fans! I love Herschell Gordon Lewis I really do! I love that he had the balls (or the marketing savvy) to put such horrible grue up on the screen in such quantities. I love every bit of cheesy dialog, every piece of wonderfully stilted acting, and flimsy sets, I do I do I do! The thing is that this movie just sucks. That's all there is to it. It's the weakest HGL film I've seen since Monster a Go-Go (which was just two awful films poorly pieced together). Why?
First of all, it's a blatant rip-off of Roger Corman's Bucket of Blood, which has had a ton of imitators both good and bad since it came out in 1959. They even tried to stick the beatnik comedy relief from that movie in here and it just comes off as super annoying. Plus it doesn't fit very well at all. So, the plots not original, that can be overcome right?
Well for another thing, there's just not that much gore! There was only one gut ripping scene for crying out loud! What a bummer! There's blood yes, but not as much as you'd think either. That was a huge letdown. Plus there's usually lots of campy over and non-acting to laugh at, but here it just all seems incredibly flat outside of the old bag that goes to buy Mr. Crazy's paintings.
The whole thing just seems like no one was really trying by the time this one came around and it turns out there's actually a reason for that.
This is part three of what fans have dubbed Lewis's "blood trilogy" that he made with David F. Friedman. After this movie they parted ways and both made some fantastically gory films after, but here they seem bored with what they're doing. The last movie in a trilogy is usually the worst eh? Indiana Jones is excluded of course, that didn't get horrible till the fourth movie. (A refrigerator? Give me a frickin' break!)

There is some good stuff here though among the tedium:
*Those paddle water bikes! That was what people rode before jet skis were invented apparently.
*Cute girls in 60's era bikinis. No boobs though, although the movie teases us into thinking we're going to see some several times. Boo!
*The line: "Holy bananas! It's a girl's leg!" The guy kinda sounded like Shaggy when he said it too. Now that would make a good Scooby-Doo episode!
*The crazy artist and his girlfriend's loving relationship: "Adam, if we ever get married, the first thing I'll do is... get a divorce." "Dear, if we ever got married the first thing I'd do is get a psychologist!"
*I'd say the guts squeezing scene, but it's not that great and it's seems like it was recycled from Blood Feast. Most of the kills and the gore here are kinda lame, sadly.

Only watch this one if you've seen a lot of other Lewis movies and have decided you really like his stuff. Watching this one first might really turn you off. Watch Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, and The Wizard of Gore first. And for Rod's sake don't watch Monster a Go-Go! Never ever! (Unless it's being ripped on by snarky robots).

A Strange Adventure (1956)

2009-02-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

What the heck is with that title? It makes this sound like a lame fantasy type movie, and it came in a horror box set, but it's actually a crime drama! True it is sort of an adventure but it's not that strange...I give up.
The film centers around a clean cut 1950s youth, who looks about 25, who gets kidnapped by gangsters who he had no idea were gangsters (you'd think the trench coats and fedora hats would be a dead giveaway) and taken up to a secluded cabin in the mountains with a pile of stolen cash. There he meets a guy who's job is to measure snow for the electric company (?) and falls in love with his sister. Pretty soon they're snowed in. Well, they say they're snowed in but it looks like there's only a couple of inches on the ground. Maybe the filmmakers were from California and thats why they thought a lot of snow looked like, but I grew up in Michigan and I can tell you different.
For what it is, this really isn't that bad. The actors are actually really good, and there's some good fistfights. There's also a few bits of T and A, as much as they would allow in the 1950s anyways. Seems like the filmmakers were pushing to see what they could get away with, the cleavage and swimsuit were much appreciated.
Hey, I just thought of something. That girl was sunning by the pool earlier in the movie but later they complain about how cold it is, and then it snows! What the heck? True they do go up in the mountains, but that's no excuse!
There's a ton of plot holes in this movie that you could drive a truck through. The good guys are supposedly being held captive and can't get away, but they could easily run for it since the gangsters seem content to let them roam around at will.
And why did the kid's (snicker) mother automatically assume that the kid had eloped? That was pretty funny.
It was fun to watch though. I got a few good laughs out of the fact that one of the characters who you never see is named Woody. Thus you get lines like, "you never jumped like that for woody!" and "Woody is harder than you!" I'm so immature, I admit it.
The ending sucks though, its almost seems like they ran out of film and just tacked it on with Popsicle sticks and Elmer's school glue.
This seems to be pretty rare but if you have the Mill Creek 100 Horror Movie Box set, give it a whirl. If you do have box set, then why haven't you watched this one yet? It's only on the sixth disc!

"You know, it's economical not to have a storyline, cause then you can just film people saying things. " Crow T. Robot

2009-02-07T01:18:00.000-08:00

The Werewolf of Washington (1973)
This movie is stupid. It's not stupid in an enjoyable way either, its stupid in an irritating, "why the Hell am I still watching this?" sort of way. Apparently that was supposed to be the point. That may be so, but that doesn't make this any less irritating. Or stupid.

A White House press secretary who's boffing the president's daughter gets a free trip to Budapest where he's attacked by a wolf and leered at by gypsies. When he gets back to the US he starts seeing the mark of the pentagram on people's hands who then promptly die horrible deaths. That's pretty much the whole movie. I guess it's supposed to be political satire of some sort since the Ted Turner looking president seems to represent Nixon and he keeps mentioning "that thing going on in Asia" but it took me awhile before I even realized they were trying to be funny. This is poorly made low budget crud and it's boring on top of that. Don't bother.

But if you do, heres some things to look out for:
* The constant ripping off of The Wolfman:
The silver headed cane, the transformation effects, the pentagrams, even the first wolf attack is blatantly stolen.
*Dean Stockwell was in Quantum Leap. Watch that show instead of this.
*I wasn't sure, so I rewound it and paused, but I don't think the guy shooting after the phone booth attack even had a gun in his hand! A better quality print would probably have some answers.
*The way the phone booth tips over like it wasn't connected to anything.
*What's with the midget Dr. Frankenstein? He comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the plot. After a few scenes he's never seen again. And look closely in his lab, there's a sort of gay looking guy in a glass box! Huge WTF moment right there.
*"Will you two faggots shut up?" Oh movie, thats not funny and now you've just pissed me off!
*When Stockwell throws the gypsies necklace in the toilet (why would he do that?) it's a point of view shot looking up and the necklace lands on the camera.
*The president hardly ever has any security around him and at the end he's being attacked and then stands at a podium bleeding to death and no one lifts a finger.
*The president has a really cheap looking bowling alley, with tacky wood paneled walls.
*They say the congressman's wife got her guts ripped out but then we flash to a scene of her with a small cut on her throat. And how in the world did she get in that shopping cart? And how was she there so long in a crowded parking lot without anybody seeing her?
*The Watergate Hotel. Oh the laughter that made me laugh. I thought I would die.
*The president mentions "those two kids that died in Ohio" but he messes up. There were four college students killed at Kent State not two. Was that intentional? The filmmakers might have been trying to be subtly funny, but they failed. Seems like a good assessment of the whole movie if you ask me.

This movie made me ask again, why are there not more good werewolf movies? It's a question that often plagues my sleep. There's tons of good vampire movies and Frankenstein films but this mainstay of the horror genre has so little of good quality that it's baffling.
For a good time watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of Werewolf. No matter how many times I've seen that one, the line "Paul, you is a wurrwilf" still makes me laugh like a little boy seeing his teacher poop himself.

Movie Marathon - Here at the end of all things...

2009-02-02T02:46:00.000-08:00

So it's back to work tomorrow. In the morning I will have to pull myself out of bed before the damn sun is up, put a uniform on, and go sit at a desk all day. Sigh, I just keep telling myself that I've only got a few more years left...
Instead of desperately trying to catch up on the movies I missed and writing crappy small posts on them I've been doing, I decided to make it worthwhile and re-watch and write about my favorite movie ever...

Dead Alive AKA Brain Dead (1992)

Horror Pictures at satanspace.com
Ah yes, the best movie almost no one has seen, directed by none other than LoTR's Peter Jackson.
Why does this movie kick so much ass? For one thing, it's freakin' hilarious! It's like a live action cartoon with zombies, nasty gross out gags, and more blood and gore than all the movies in the Friday the 13th franchise combined. And a Kung Fu priest! ("Stand back boy, this calls for divine intervention!")
Most movies have one or two scenes that you can point to as the moment that truly make it great but Dead Alive keeps throwing them at you one after another till the insane climax, and then goes a step further! I won't spoil anything but I really want more people to see this movie. More people with my sick sense of humor anyways.
And It's not just old ladies eating their own ears and zombie babies getting punched in the face, its also a pretty sweet love story which gives the movie a surprising amount of heart. Although I doubt your girlfriend would want to watch this one with you, and if she does, then for Cthulhu's sake hold onto that girl!

Favorite quotes:
"you've got...the bite!"
"Does this look like a well maintained frontage?!!"
"It bit me, I've been savaged!"
"Your mother ate my dog!" "Not...all of him."
"Story goes these great big rats came scurrying off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys!"
"That's my mother's grave you're pissing on!"
"Annual meeting. Annual meeting...ANNUAL MEETING!"
"Ahhh, so you found your father's old stag movies, did ya? Is that the one with the donkey and the chambermaid?"
And of course the immortal..."I kick ass for the lord!"

So please go watch this movie right now, and report back here. That is your mission! Track it down at all costs!

Movie Marathon Day 3 - Good Movie Sunday

2009-02-01T06:54:00.000-08:00

Today's films were chosen randomly from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, a very good book that all cinema fans should have a copy of.

The Killers (1946)

Two hitmen show up at a diner in a small out of the way town and end up killing a man in a nearby hotel. An insurance claim investigator ends up getting involved in the case and we get to learn just exactly what went down and why through a series of interviews with people involved.
You gotta love a good crime noir and this nearly forgotten gem is one of the best ever made. This is also the second Ernest Hemingway movie I've seen this year that has Ava Gardner in it. This one's a lot better though, instead of a sappy love story, it has crooks in suits and fedora hats shooting each other. Ava is really stunning in this movie, just look at her:

Yowza! She also plays quite the conniving wolf in sheep's clothing but you don't find out how evil she really is till the end.
My favorite bad ass character in a film full of them is Jack Lambert as Dum-dum. He just looks like a guy you wouldn't want to mess with and he plays the part perfectly.
You've also got Burt Lancaster as the dead man in the role that made his a star. It was also the only movie made from his works that Hemingway actually approved of and apparently the only one that kept his dialog intact.
So yeah...great movie. Highly recommended.

L'Avventura (1960)

Several spoiled rich people are taking a yacht vacation and stop on a rocky island, when one vanishes.
You'd think that the rest of the movie would be about the other people trying to find the girl but this is an art film so of course it completely bucks convention. Everyone goes back to their spoiled rich lives and forget that she ever existed. Eventually the plot settles on the rocky love affair of two of the people. It also muses on love, sex, the difference between men and women, the futility of art, and the how women are looked at by the world and treated by men.
The film moves very very slowly. So slowly that when it premiered at Cannes it was booed at and several smart-asses in the audience kept yelling "cut." It may be slow but I got used to it after awhile and ended up giving in and just let the movie give me what it would. The cinematography and camera work are excellent. The rocky island is especially gorgeous in its barrenness as are the ancient Italian buildings. It is a beautiful film, but very challenging, and not for everyone, especially not people without patience. I ended up liking it I can see how most people would find it boring, it was even hard for me to sit through at parts.
After finishing the film and mulling it around in my head, it's left me with a very strange hollow feeling, an empty sadness that I can't seem to explain. The film's atmosphere combined with a weird dream I had this morning have left me in a very odd state of mind.
Hopefully I'll be better in the morning. I still have one more day left after all....

Movie Marathon Day 3 - Part 1

2009-01-31T22:01:00.000-08:00

Short film:
A Fix (2008)

First off, check out the trailer:

Looks interesting right? Well, it was interesting enough for me to track the film down. You can actually buy it for about 15 bucks here: http://www.afixthemovie.com/
But is it worth it?

Even though it's not said on any of the interviews on the disc, this is obviously not a short film by choice. This is a short film because the people making it ran out of money and resources. The pieces of deleted scenes added as a bonus seem to play this out. There's an entire subplot that got aborted and the quickie ending just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. So what you get is 27 minuets of an unfinished film, interesting more for what it could have been than what it is.

There's so much potential for this to be really good but it needed to be fleshed out and theres too many scenes that needed a couple more re-shoots. The actors are all good though and it's always nice to see actual teens in a movie about teens. I just wish it wasn't trying so hard to be a "message" film since the message is that choking yourself to get high is bad. Do kids actually do this? According to the director it's a major problem. I knew kids in high school that would do stupid shit like that, but they were all stoners that would try and get high off of anything and even they weren't stupid enough to wrap a belt around their necks. I knew one kid that sat in the back of math class that would put his hands around his neck till he passed out. This was also the kid that crushed Ritalin pills with a key and then snorted them. If there's cute teenage girls doing it like the movie depicts, I'll eat my shoes.

Most of the people on IMDB that seem to really like this one are teenage girls, so maybe I'm not in the target demographic. Its not like its really terrible, it just needs work. I would recommend it if you are one of the aforementioned teenage girls, or if you just want to see a film that died in an embryonic state. Or if you want to see the girl from Lazytown holding a gun.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to choke myself and watch the 1970s King Kong remake to see if it makes it more entertaining. Oh the Hell with it, I'll just get some beer...

Marathon Update Day 2 Part 2

2009-01-31T08:14:00.000-08:00

Diatron-5 AKA The Micro-Commando Diatron-5 AKA Space Transformers

Oh dollar DVD, what hath thou wrought on mine head this time? Before I watched this one I researched it a bit, and surprisingly I couldn't find anything about it on IMDB, which is strange because just about every movie ever made is on that site, including that hidden footage of your mother going down on the mailman. Seriously, it has the director's name and filming locations and everything, thats how your Dad found out about it.
Good ole Wikipedia has an article about it though. It had an article revealing that your mother was a whore too, but that got taken down.
According to the Wikipedia article, probably written by some very hardcore Asian animation nerds, this is a Korean film thats been dubbed into English twice and is readily available on cheap DVD in the states. The one I got is from Wal-mart's Digiview label, and features a cover that sports, again according to the article, "heavily modified screenshots of Kaneda from Akira and a Modified Gundam unit, neither of which are present in the film."
I don't know why but I find that very funny. I suppose if they showed characters from the actual movie, sales would be a bit lower since everything in it looks like it was drawn by 5th graders, but it is a dollar DVD so why go to great lengths to make an actual interesting cover?

Another entry in the wonderful world of rip-off cinema, this one steals from Transformers, obviously, but it also steals a plot point from Fantastic Voyage as a good part of it features our heroes and their robots fighting inside of a girl's body. The inside of which, for some odd reason, looks like a solar system complete with different races of people on different planets! Actually, that's pretty much the whole plot: If the girl dies, then the earth dies, for reasons I couldn't quite discern.
Oh and check out this line from the Wikipedia article: "Diatron-5, when at last it is seen, turns out to be a knock-off of Battle Buffalo from the Diaclone toy line. Similarly, Diatron 3 is Big Powered, and the enemy mecha is Warudaros.
A Choro-Q version of an Armored Trooper Votoms Scopedog also appears."
How the Hell would you know that? Thats some serious nerdage right there.

But to reiterate: This film is horribly drawn and animated, even by the mostly low standards of Asian animated films (studio Ghibli aside). There's so many animation mistakes that are so obvious even a layman like me could very easily pick most of them out. This movie would probably make an actual cartoonist or animator either cry or snap the disc in half, or both. Oh and the dubbing! Once again I stumble onto a bad film made worse by the terrible English voices substituted for the original ones. Half the time it doesn't even seem like the actors are even trying, or they're trying too hard. It's all pretty laughable though, which is a good way to describe the film as a whole.
Seek out at your own risk.

So thats it for today. Check back tomorrow, to see if I can actually watch all the movies I said I was going to and not crap out. Should be fun!

Update!
Check this out: http://teleport-city.com/wordpress/?p=831
This page has lots of info about this odd piece of dung, with screencaps!

Move Marthon Update Day 2 Part 1

2009-01-31T04:09:00.000-08:00

The Madmen of Mandoras (1963)
This film is a great example of why one should not ingest drugs before writing a script. Plot: Hitler didn't die at the end of WWII, doctors were able to save him and now he lives on...as a head in a jar! Surprisingly he doesn't talk much, I think he only says "Schnell Schnell!" once and for the rest of the movie he just sneers and grimaces. His followers are going to release a deadly gas into the world that will kill everyone and allow them to rule. The movie doesn't say how they're going to rule with everyone dead however but they do point out towards the end that it doesn't make much sense. Nazis are just stupid I guess.
The crazy thing about this movie is that it's actually competently filmed and is quite stylized with lots of shadows that was apparently influenced by the German films of the 20s and 30s. It's really trying hard to be a noirish type thriller and it fails horribly. The main reason is the awful script and premise. Hitler's head in a jar, seriously? It really is laughably silly and the poor special effects don't help it one bit. Nor do the other bits of silliness that keep popping up throughout:
A car pulls alongside another car and shoots one of its occupants and then drives off. The other people have no idea what just happened and it takes them quite awhile to figure out that he's dead.
The guy who plays Hitler is terrible and in his short non-jar scene he rants and raves in a poor imitation of Hitler giving a speech. I'm pretty sure he didn't talk or act like that all the time. Maybe this scene is why the actor didn't have anymore lines for the rest of the movie, thats my best guess anyways.
And lastly, the new mighty Nazi army is defeated by a bunch of idiots with hand grenades. You think the followers of Hitler's head would be smarter and harder to kill. I'd also think that there'd be more of them. That's probably a budget thing. For this film to actually sort of work it needed a couple more bucks to be sunk into it. I'm guessing the script got shopped around and laughed at quite a few times before it finally got backers.

I did learn some very good lessons from watching Mandoras though: Film within your limits and a good script is everything. No matter how competent a director you are or how good your actors or crew is, if your script is stupid your movie will be stupid also. And don't try to pull off Hitler's head in a jar unless you can make it look good. Actually don't do heads in jars at all unless you're Futurama.
Credit has to go to the people who put this on DVD, the transfer is excellent! I've never seen an old B-Movie look so sharp before and it was really something of a shock. I guess someone does love these movies as much as I do, which is nice to know.
So this silly and pretty boring film came out and bombed and was soon forgotten. Then several years later the rights to the film were sold to TV stations where it was ruled that the film was too short and the title sucked. So they changed the title and added new footage and the film became...
They Saved Hitler's Brain
Just how much footage was added? Twenty freakin' minuets! Twenty pointless minuets were added to the front of the film, the music was changed, and the narsty melting Hitler head at the end was shortened for tender TV audience's eyes. Oh yeah, and it was given that infamous title.
The new footage is of two stupid CID agents running around trying to figure out...something, and then they die a half hour in. It's really funny because it's so poorly inserted. The style of filming is of much lower quality, making you actually appreciate how well filmed Mandoras really is, and the clothing and hair is completely different. It's only for the first part of the movie though, then the rest of it goes on as normal, if normal can be applied to a movie where Hitler's head is carried around in a jar by little handles (snicker).

My Drive-in Cult Classics box set came with a nice little booklet that has info on all the movies in it. Here's what the guy who added the extra footage to Mandoras had to say about the experience:
"I shot new footage and I actually changed the title, so I came up with They Saved Hitler's Brain," Hulette says. "I couldn't help but laugh. Here I was, I've got a master's degree in filmmaking and in music, and I'm sitting there at a 35mm moviola looking at the head of Hitler in a bottle. I'm trying to use my talent to figure out how to make this work for the audience and thinking to myself, "I went to college for this?"
He even says he gets Christmas cards from friends with Hitler's head on them and asks, why couldn't it have been They Saved Einstein's brain?
Well, would you want to see a movie with that title? Me neither!
Long live Hitler's brain! Schnell! Schnell!

Marathon Update Part 1

2009-01-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

It's 1:30 in the morning at end of the first day of my B-movie splurge. Just three movies down out of eleven, I wonder if I'll be able to hold out? Hopefully the rest of the movies I picked will be as much fun as these first three.

Vendetta dal futuro AKA Hands of Steel AKA Atomic Cyborg (1986)

If that poster doesn't make you want to see this movie than I pity you poor soul. How about the fact that it's an Italian rip off of both The Terminator and Over the Top and guest stars John Saxon? Still no? Well then there really is no hope for you, you have too much taste.
I kid but I'm really starting to get into these Italian rip-off movies, they're such stupid fun.
Hands of Steel is from the 80s when Italian cinema was filled with post apocalyptic movies in the wake of The Terminator and John Carpenter's Escape films. I've seen a couple before but this has got to be the cheapest most half ass one ever. They barley make an effort to make it futuristic at all. I can hear the director now: "Okay, lets throw some tubes on that car and give that guy a plastic flak vest, yeah that'll work. Oh and get some footage of homeless people for the opening so the audience knows that the future really sucks. Good, now lets go shoot some more helicopter scenes."
On top of that they cut away from most of the major effects including a scene where a guy gets his heart ripped out and we don't see a drop of blood! Of course all of this just adds to the fun and the many action sequences really aren't half bad.
So...arm wrestling with snakes, stuff blowing up, the worst actors this side of an Ed Wood film, John Saxon, a crazy pissed off cyborg girl, and a huge friggin' laser gun...you need to see this movie.

One Frightened Night (1935)

In the 30s and 40s a lot of film companies sprang up that made movies of dubious quality very quickly and very cheaply. These companies were nicknamed "poverty row" and you can find a lot of their films pretty easily on cheap DVD, many of them starring Bela Lugosi.
Poverty row companies liked to do old dark house movies because the plots usually weren't too complex and all you really needed was an old dark house and some actors. I've seen some pretty good ones and some awful ones but this is the best one I've found yet. (The worst one I've ever seen is The Gorilla with Bela Lugosi and the amazingly annoying Ritz Brothers).
The plot is a bit more complex than usual, involving the usual inheritance plotting and hidden passageways and murder most foul but with a few twists and the mystery is actually quite engrossing. It just seems like they put more care into this one, either that or the people involved actually knew what they were doing.
The guy who plays the magician looked really familiar to me but I couldn't place it till I looked him up on IMDB. Turns out he was the helpful clown in Freaks! If you haven't seen Freaks you really should. I think all people who like weird movies need to see it at least once. Oh yeah and Uncle Henry from The Wizard of Oz is here too! I loves my character actors, yes I do!
Best line: "She won't talk...a Remarkable Woman Indeed"

La Orgía nocturna de los vampiros AKA The Vampires' Night Orgy AKA Grave Desires (1973)

I love Italian horror films but I haven't seen too many Spanish ones yet, not uncut anyways. Unfortunately uncut ones are hard to find and, alas, this one was cut to shreds. You see, the Spanish seem to be quite open about their sexuality, more so than most of the world it seems, except maybe the French, and thus their movies have lots of naked girls running around in them. Yes, even the horror movies. When they export their films to the prudish rest of the world they either edit them down or re-film scenes with the girls wearing clothes. This one has a ridiculous example of this where a guy is watching a girl undress through a peephole but in this edited version she has her clothes on the whole time, so whats he so excited about? She even has a brief topless scene later (the only one that survived) so it makes it even more pointless. Stupid censors.
So how is the movie otherwise? Surprisingly good actually. A bus driver dies suddenly and his passengers take refuge in a strange out of the way town, which of course turns out to be populated with vampires. Then they're picked off one by one. It's pretty inventive, there's a huge guy who likes to hack off limbs with an ax, cannibalism, and an unsettling child death. The only major problem (other than the bad dubbing) is the soundtrack. Why did people insist on putting upbeat jazz in horror films? It doesn't fit the mood at all and ruins several good scenes.
This was good enough that I'm thinking of looking around to see if I can find an uncut print, I wonder if there's boxsets of Spanish horror films...

Okay, so tired! Must go sleep! More wonderful crap tomorrow!

Movie Marathon Coming Up!

2009-01-30T00:18:00.000-08:00

I've figured out the whole movie a day thing doesn't really work when you have a job to go to everyday that sometimes requires extracurricular activities. So thats out the window. I do, however, have a three day weekend coming up and that means...a movie marathon! Oh marathons, how I've missed you.
I'm going to do this thing up good this weekend, here's the schedule:

Friday Night (Tonight):
Hands of Steel
One Frightened Night
Vampire's Night Orgy

Saturday:
The Madmen of Mandoras
They Saved Hitler's Brain
Space Transformers

Sunday:
Short Film: A Fix
Good Movie Break: L'Avventura and The Killers
The Babysitter
Weekend with the Babysitter

Something Weird Monday:
The Thirsty Dead
Swamp of the Ravens
The Child

Expect the first post later tonight!

Day #4: The Garage (1920)

2009-01-28T01:24:00.000-08:00

Experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. The movie I was going to rip on tonight came in the mail not just scratched but severely gouged, rendering it unplayable. This kind of took the wind out of my sails but seeing as how it was a movie about Barney the Purple Lump of Shit that Looks Like a Dinosaur and I was going to watch it as a joke anyways, I don't feel like sending it back and waiting for it to come in again. I'm not that pathetic. So here's a silent film that I've never seen. I love silent movies and you get to watch this one with me!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Random Thoughts
*Boy, Keaton sure was the best at falling down!
*Love Buster's facial expressions when the dogs biting him!
*A young virgin of 35! This was a precode movie, you couldn't get away with that kind of sexual reference later on.
*Hee hee, Buster's little jig cracks me the Hell up.
*Buster up the fire pole!
*Pad = bed?
*Ha ha, that was genius!
*Holy cow that fire is huge!
*Cute girl in the bathtub, the Hayes Code would not approve.
*Oh Fatty, stepping on it isn't going to work you silly billy! Oh wait, putting your butt on it will!
*Aww, she's not naked...
*In the telephone wires! So so funny.
*No CGI here, they're really up there!
*Buster Keaton + Fatty Arbuckle = Awesome and win!

I really needed that to lift my spirits. Back to horrible movies tomorrow night!

Day #3: Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

2009-01-27T04:40:00.000-08:00

A good friend of mine had sent me several dollar DVDs for Christmas because I had told her that I liked those things and have had a hard time finding them lately for some reason. Among those was this movie. Thanks Jen!
Tonight I thought I'd watch a good movie or at least a movie that looked competently made with actual good actors in it. I decided this because tomorrow night I plan on watching what might be one of the worst movies ever made and a crap movie before that one might just kill me. Tune in to see if I survive...
SOK is released here on the Digiview label, and is a typically murky print with lots of grain, flecking, and much too dark night scenes. It's watchable, though I think for the cinematography to be truly appreciated, you would need a better print.
You might be surprised that you can get a movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in it for a dollar but I'm not. I've been a lowly movie nerd scouring the racks at Wal-mart and Dollar Tree for these things for too long to be surprised at some of the stuff you can find.
I've gotten some very good movies and some absolute crap this way, everything from cartoons to old TV shows to classic movies to long forgotten junk that should have stayed in the trash bin it was pulled out of. The arm of the public domain is very long my friends, very long indeed and as long as you don't mind the print quality looking pristine every time you can find some very interesting stuff.

Okay enough about that, how was this movie? Well, it was good but it could have been a lot better. For one thing it was a bit too long. I understand that trying to cut down a novel for film is a hard thing to do but according to IMDB Hemingway was actually quite angry that they padded out the plot by pulling from bits of his other works. So cutting a bit of it's 117 minute running time would have helped. Also, even though the actors were all great, I was never really pulled into the movie or the characters like I should have been. It turned out to be merely an interesting movie instead of fascinating one. Not a bad way to spend an evening, although it would have been nice to watch with a girl friend type person, but I sadly lack the company of one at the moment.

Un-PC Count
African's are called uncivilized, "you Africans", and the "white man's burden". I'm also sure that the PETA people would shit themselves at all the safari animal killings as well as the bull fight scene.
Are witch doctors considered un-pc now? I'll bet making fun of them sure is!

Cigarette Tally
Six coffin nails and all in love scenes!

Random Thoughts Whilst Watching
*Ah, the Digiview theme music: So grand, so sweeping, so hopelessly cheesy.
*Atticus! Atticus! Sorry, had a Mockingbird flashback there for a bit.
*Kind of clunky exposition isn't it?
*Ummm, hippos are quite mean animals, you might not want to paddle that close. Told ya so!
*Ah, the expendable black man, a staple of film from quite early on. At least this one lived.
*Screw that! If my leg was rotting away I'd take all the booze I could get!
*"Go fly a kite" is 1950's slang for "go fuck yourself"
*Only Hemingway would compare writing to a hunt.
*I'd like to be stuck in Africa with Susan Hayward, well maybe not with a rotting leg...
*Nice move! Fake a kiss and grab the booze! No! Don't dump it out!
*People dancing happily to accordions, thats something you don't see much anymore.
*People sitting quietly listening to jazz music, thats something you don't see much anymore.
*A single bed? That's rare for the time.
*The actors obviously weren't near those animals but the whole scene is quite well put together.
*That alchyhol can't be good for your baby! Oh wait, this is the 1950s...
*Notice how they never use the word "pregnant".
*Ha ha, there's the separate beds! And he knocked her up how?
*I think I would like it if a woman killed an animal and brought it to me to eat.
*Hmmm, I think today that would be called "stalking"
*Yeah, you show them Peck! Real men break shit when they get mad!
*Real men are apparently cold hearted assholes too...
*How the Hell did he get drafted into the Spanish civil war? Did I miss something?
*BOOM! BOOM! CRASH! That was kinda cool.
*Rushing up the hill into a nest of machine guns, who's idea was that?
*Awww, love among the bullets. Best part of the movie and also the saddest...
*After all that depressing war stuff, it's nice to hear some hot jazz.
*Aw, how sweet, so that's how they found each other! Back to the loveless state of their current relationship I guess...
*This should be touching but darn it, the dialog is just too clunky!
*Oooh, that looks like it's going to hurt, I don't care if his leg is paralyzed. Eeeeee-ouch!
*Creepy hyena and a happy ending. I wonder if thats how the book ends? I'll have to read it.

DVD Extras
The usual bunch of Digiview previews, all played over their majestic theme of ultimate cheese. I've even seen a few of these, thats kind of sad.

Final Thoughts
Not bad for a buck (or free in my case). Great actors in an alright movie is still well worth the watch. Hopefully it's steeled me for tomorrow, oh you guys just wait...

Day #2: La Guerra dei robot AKA War of the Robots (1978)

2009-01-26T05:17:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wanted to know what Star Wars would have been like if it was made by Italians with no money and it sucked? Well then track down War of the Robots, it's in the public domain so you can find it pretty easily on Dollar DVD. The Italians went nuts for sci-fi epics in the 70s after Star Wars came out and they made a ton of these things. Just like they went nuts for gaillo films before that, and sword and sandal epics before that, and post apocalyptic films in the 80s. The Italians seem to like to grab hold of a genre and squeeze every drop out of it they can before dropping it and moving on to something else. This makes for many many laughably cheap movies. Like this one here!

So let me try and get a wrangle on the plot. There's this scientist right? And he has this hot assistant and has created a device that will be able to create any form of new life possible. Unfortunately he gets kidnapped and the thing goes haywire and he's the only one who knows the codes to stop it before it blows up the earth. The kidnappers are a bunch of old men in bad makeup that want to use him (and his hot assistant) to help them achieve immortality because they already tried it and just succeeded in making their faces look like crap.
Enter our heroes, who have to rescue the professor (and his hot assistant) before the earth is blown into space dust. Then it sort of gets confusing. For some reason they crash land on an asteroid and find a bunch of rejects from a sword and sandal flick and end up recruiting their leader somehow, then they all travel to the planet of the old men to find that the professor (and his hot assistant) are both evil. But it turns out that the hot assistant isn't evil and helps them capture the professor but then it turns out that she is evil after all and some sort of empress and there's these "androids" which are just guys in cheap gold wigs...
At this point I stopped trying to figure out what was going on entirely and just laughed at the horrible final space battle, some of which looked like it was stolen from an Asteroids rip-off game.
The plot isn't really whats important important in these things. What is important is hot Italian girls in tight suits. And wonderfully horrible dubbing. Ever wonder what the worst fake Texas accent ever would sound like? This is your chance to find out from a guy with Greatest American Hero hair and cowboy boots.

Gore level
Non-existent. When any laser pistols are fired you don't even see a shot or where it hits. The person (or robot) just falls over. There's also a light saber fight where some of the prince valiant robots get cut in half but there's no blood, just some really fake looking robo-innards.

T And A
Lots of hot Italian girls in tight suits which doesn't really help much to make this thing any easier to sit through.

Random Thoughts Whilst Watching
*Patricia Gore? I wish my last name was gore.
*Film score by Casio.
*Oh horrible dubbing, how I missed thee!
*Oh wow, nice space car! What is that a Pinto?
*Killer Prince Valiant robots!
*I love the shag carpet on the floor of the control room. I wonder if this was filmed in someones living room?
*This is the worst 2001 rip off I've ever seen. Watch as our hero swims through space!
*He space cursed! Good thing he apologized afterwards.
*Cowboy boots mean he's from Texas. Sadly this is the deepest this film is going to go into characterization.
*Buff men in leather diapers? Yup, it's an Italian film alright.
*Now the guy sounds like Bob Dylan! You're telling me you couldn't hire an actual Texan to dub the voice in?
*Great line: "It's crazy! It's like a harvest of human flesh!"
*Sing it with me: He's got Marty Feldman eyes!
*These robots really suck, you can just push them over!
*Light swords? Nope, this isn't ripping off Star Wars at all. Not a bit.
*Why the frick didn't they put the evil professor in a cell? And I'm glad that doctor died. He was too stupid to live.
*Wow, it must be really cold on that ship, if you catch my drift...
*So...they just left the evil empress lying on the floor? Where did she get that spacesuit from? There she goes swimming through space...
*Get ready for an epic space battle! And by epic I mean really confusing and poorly done. The 1970s video game you stole your graphics from wants them back.
*Oh God, just shut up about how much you love her and shoot her down! She's evil you moron!
*Oh good it's over. The wigmaker gets a credit, why am I not surprised?

DVD Extras
Nil.

Final Thoughts
I'm hungry. An omelette would be great right now. Maybe with some cheese and mushrooms and green peppers. Yup, an omelette I shall make. Omelette's are good!

Day #1: Amityville: The Evil Escapes AKA The Amityville Horror: The Evil Escapes, Part 4 (1989)

2009-01-25T01:51:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome to my little experiment! Having an overabundance of movies sitting around thanks to cheap box sets, insatiable bargain bin scrounging, and Netflix, I've decided to see how long I could keep up watching and writing about at least one or two a day. Simple right? Well life does tend to get in the way so this should be interesting. Lets get to the first movie shall we?

I probably should have picked a better film to start off with but my actual good films, by way of Netflix, won't be in for another couple of days. I went to the store today and even though I told myself I was just going to buy razors and nothing else, I ended up grabbing several cheap movies and the new Playboy with Bridget Marquardt on the cover. Bad movies and cute girls are my two main weaknesses. A cute girl who owns an Ed Wood box set would probably give me a heart attack and I'm only 22.
Anyways, I saw this thing sitting in the bargain box staring at me forlornly, it's pathetic five dollar price sticker marked down to 3.45 and I couldn't resist, even though I've never seen another Amityville movie ever (though I have read the book). A 4th unasked for sequel to a movie that wasn't that great in the first place? Staring Patty Duke? "Yes please" I said even though I was quite sure I'd regret it later.
It turns out thats it's a made for TV movie which made it even better! So...how is it you ask? Well it turns out it's about a killer lamp...

The movie opens with a bunch of priests trying to exorcise the old house, which is kinda stupid. Didn't they try and fail to do that in all three previous movies? Why do they think it'll work now? Of course it doesn't and one young priest ends up in the hospital. Cut to a garage sale (!) where all the furniture in the house is being sold. Okay. Who's selling this stuff and why? Who's getting the money? Who the heck would buy a bunch of crap from a haunted house where so many people have died? Well, I would, but there's nothing but old ladies here. One old lady decides to buy a lamp that looks like it was designed by Tim Burton and mail it to her sister as a joke. A tacky 100 dollar joke. It was at this point that I yelled at my TV screen: "You have got to be fucking kidding me! This can't be what this movie's about!" Yup, this movie is about a possessed killer lamp. Really. What drunk hack writer came up with that?
So the lamp ends up in the possession (that pun was unintentional, sorry) of a nice cranky old grandma right as her daughter (Patty Patty Duke yall!) and three very late 80's looking kids move in with her. Ah the early 90's, when you could wear a half mullet and a rattail and not get beat up. Oh and there's the prerequisite creepy little autistic girl thats been in so many horror movies its gone beyond cliché into ridiculousness.
Then weird shit starts happening and people start dying and of course no one suspects the lamp even though it creeps out the housemaid, for some reason, who moves it into the attic. No one ever suspects the lamp, except the young priest who comes back to fight it.
Just when I think I've seen everything bad horror movies can throw at me along comes something else. A priest holding a crucifix trying to drive a demon out of a piece of furniture, who woulda thunk? Ya know, The Muppet Show had a really funny skit one time where furniture was coming to life and eating people. It was funny because it was so stupid. I wonder how the writers of this movie could have missed that episode?

Gore level: For a made for TV snorefest that sometimes seems like it was made for the Lifetime Channel it's got some surprising bits of blood and gross out stuff. Of course it's pretty tame, but it's enough to make the middle aged women at home, watching it to see Patty Duke, spill their Ensure onto their pastel stretch-pants. Gotta love a good hand in the garbage disposal scene.

T and A: None and I'm damn thankful for it. There was too many middle aged women in this one (shiver). Although, the girl who played the teenage daughter was kinda cute in a weird early 90's way. You rock that jean jacket and black fishnet stockings girl!

Random thoughts whilst watching:
*I did not need to see that old ladies shriveled up finger thank you very much.
*Boy is that kid ugly! And with such wonderful fashion sense: Mullet! Rattail! Calculator watch! Nike pumps! The girls should be all over him.
*Bird in the toaster oven! Shouldn't they have smelled it cooking?
*Possessed chainsaw + Ugly little boy = some very funny shit! Go get grandma boy, go get her!
*I appreciate how they keep trying to make that lamp scary but it's a friggin' lamp! It's not going to work, give it up!
* Hand in the garbage disposal! Splatter! I'm guessing thats the most blood NBC would let them get away with.
*Plumber swallows nasty goop and dies. Why the Hell was there a hand in that pipe?
*Run preacher boy, run away from that lamp like the wuss you really are!
*Lamp out the window, lamp out the window! A ha ha! It exploded in a ball of fire! I'm rewinding that shit!
*It's all over and back to normal. Wait...did they ever find that plumber that died in the basement? Grandma's going to get a nice surprise next time she goes down there to get some pickled beets.
*The End. So now the cats possessed. That's certainly a better concept than a stupid looking lamp. Why didn't they just use that?

DVD Extras
Amityville: The True Story
This looked like it was going to be a documentary which would have been cool but it turned out to be a bunch of text with information you could easily pull off the net. Boo!
About Patty Duke (!)
Just what I've always wanted!
Trivia
It says Amityville Trivia but it's all about Patty Duke! I now know more about this woman than any straight male should. Thank you DVD!

Final thoughts: Totally stupid and totally worth 3 dollars and 45 cents. I'd love to get a bunch of friends together and make them watch this. It'd be great to sit and mock.
Not a bad start to this little deal here. Hope my writing was at least passably interesting. See you all tomorrow!