Recent viewings

[Jack]

Dinocroc vs. Supergator (2010) - a bio-engineering lab creates our title characters and it doesn't take 5 minutes before they escape and start terrorizing Hawaii. A cute conservation officer teams up with a government agent and a big game hunter to see if they can quell the terror. Produced by Roger Corman and directed by Jim Wynorski, it's 90 minutes of dumb fun exactly as you'd expect. The CGI was far from great, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some other movies I've seen. 3.5/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"The 12 Disasters of Christmas" (2012)

SyFy Channel holiday flick that mashes up the "Mayan calendar/2012" world-is-gonna-end nonsense with clumsy Biblical allegory. It's December 21st, 2012, and as the quiet little mountain town of Calvary prepares for Christmas, huge chunks of ice rain from the sky, volcanoes threaten to erupt, and tornadoes mysteriously appear out of nowhere. Mary and Joseph's teenage daughter J.C. (yes, really) is the only one who can stop this series of world-threatening disasters... by collecting five magical golden rings left behind by the Mayans. Yes, REALLY.

This was just as bad as it sounds. It's so lame that SyFy didn't even bother to put a trailer on YouTube.

[fulci420]

I have been trying to delve into foreign cinema recently having been greatly impressed by Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs trilogy, I decided it was time to check out Ingmar Bergman. I know next to nothing about the guy other than that his films are deeply respected in critical circles. So I decided to start with...

Persona (1966)
Of all of Bergman's films this is the title which I had heard before the most. However beyond reading about it in Ebert's "Great Movies" book I did not know what to expect. Right away I was struck by the beginning a series of seemingly unrelated haunting images. Bergman's visual sense was immediately impressive. As the movie goes on we are introduced to the basic plot. An actress has stopped speaking despite being apparently mentally and physically fine. A nurse takes it upon herself to try and get the actress to speak again. They first interact in a hospital but are soon moved to a summer home where the nurse begins to tell more and more about her own life. As the movie goes on their personalities seem to merge and it becomes unclear whether they are even truly separate persona's.

At 80 minutes I have to admit this felt much longer. I appreciated the obvious craft of each shot and loved the B and W photography. It just didn't speak to me or have any emotional resonance, which may have as much to do with me as the actual film. It is definitely a film that I can say I appreciate but don't enjoy. Anyone here have thoughts on this film? It is available on youtube along with much of Bergman's work. Any suggestions of what other films are good to start with with this director would be appreciated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KL_SAJ_9ME

[Jack]

Strippers vs Werewolves (2012) - from the title I was expecting some Z grade schlock, but it's actually a stylish little British dark comedy. A werewolf goes to a strip club but changes from human to wolf when he gets aroused, and one of the girls kills it with a silver pen to the eyeball. So the rest of the werewolf gang is pretty upset about that and they eventually get around to attacking the club. The characters were really good; the werewolves are the scummiest scumbags imaginable, but in a very entertaining way, and the girls are kind of silly and dumb but not in the usual cliched fashion, it's more stylishly done. I still loved the scene where they're all freaked out about how much danger they're in and trying to come up with a plan of action. One of the girls says "We've got to think!"  And another says "Oh it just keeps getting worse..." It's the kind of movie that bombards you with 10 cute little funny comments per minute. Another favorite part was when the werewolves went to the club and killed a couple people, and left a message written in blood on the wall. The owner of the place is cleaning it up, but first she has to add an apostrophe and an E to what they wrote - they said "your" when it should have been "you're" Only thing I didn't care for was that in the last act it went from dark comedy to dopey comedy, but oh well, still a lot of fun. 4/5.

[alandhopewell]

                                  NIGHTMARE IN WAX (1969)
     Don't ask me why, but I was in the mood for something late 60's, cheesy, and mildly depressing, and this fit the bill. I originally saw this theatrically, on a double bill with BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE, and it hasn't gotten any better.

     For those lucky enough to have missed this, Cameron Mitchell plays a Hollywood makeup artist who (suprise!) gets his face burned by his sleasy producer boss. This, of course, unhinges his mind, and he develops a drug that puts people under his thrall, enabling him to have his-REVENGE!     

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm6fXhZ5ZsU

     John Carradine is not in this film, a glaring oversight, AFAIC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_in_Wax

[Jack]

The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (2008) - a young warrior wants to take revenge on the king (MMA fighter Randy Couture) who killed his father. The king's got supernatural powers, so our young hero teams up with a Greek poet/scribe and the babe who will be his girlfriend by the end of the movie and together they go on a big quest to retrieve the Sword of Damocles. I really enjoyed this, it's a lot of fun. Characters are very likable, it doesn't take itself seriously at all, and the plot moves along at a good pace. 4/5.

The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (2012) - some non-acting pro wrestler dude and his belching sidekick save a king from having his castle invaded by the bad guys. They're expecting a hefty payment in gold for their troubles, but it turns out the king's broke. Instead he offers his daughter's hand in marriage. Problem: his daughter's been captured by the bad guys and they need to go rescue her first. As it turns out, his daughter is the leader of a band of ninjas (yes, they had ninjas in the Middle East in 2,000 BC ) and meanwhile the bad guy has summoned three supernatural warriors to fight against our protagonists. Looks like there's gonna be a showdown! This started out pretty bad, with bad acting, bad dialogue and really lame humor. But I guess after a half hour or so I got used to it lol. Once the hot princess babe came on the scene things picked up pretty well. Plenty of good battles and the characters are a fairly likable bunch if you can actually take them seriously. 3.5/5 - which may very well be the highest rating anyone's ever given this movie 

[FatFreddysCat]

"Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytffliMuUwI

Lex Luthor is elected President of the United States, and his first official act is to declare Superman and Batman as Public Enemies #1 and 2, with a billion dollar bounty on their heads. Much butt kicking ensues, as virtually every super villain in the DC Universe - and a lot of heroes too - try to collect the reward. Oh, and just to complicate things even further for Supes and Bats, there's a gigantic kryptonite meteor headed towards Earth big enough to wipe out the planet. More action packed animated fun from DC Comics!!

[Jack]

Strigoi (2008) - quirky comedy full of offbeat characters about a guy who returns to his tiny Romanian village and finds that an old drunk that no one liked has died. The villagers claim it was "just an accident" but he's got suspicious bruises around his throat as if he was strangled. So he tries to get to the bottom of what happened and also discovers that someone's been forging land deeds. Oh and there's also these other two people that the villagers killed before he got there - they keep coming back to life and wandering around the place. They're not your typical vampires, they just stagger about acting real sickly and are easily killed. In fact the villagers must have plenty of calluses on their hands from burying these two so many times. So where is all this leading? Well, normally intersecting plot threads lead to some sort of interesting conclusion, but here they more or less fall by the wayside as we lose interest, and figure out that it's all pretty much what we thought it was in the first place. Kind of wears out its welcome around the halfway point. 2.25/5.

The Demolitionist (1995) - low budget female version of Robocop, with a policewoman being killed by a gang of bad guys and then being brought back to life via the police department's latest science experiment. No mechanical robot body here - they just dress her up in a cheesy spandex and Kevlar outfit. Looks nice So she goes around killing all the bad guys, crime rates plunge, etc. Most of the gun battles consist of her firing a gazillion rounds of ammo with her cool little machine pistols, which causes puffs of red powder to explode from the wounds. Yup, instead of blood splatters we get red powder puffs - makes it look like she's shooting pellets of chalk. Oh well. It plays out pretty much like you'd expect, with the mayor cancelling the robobabe project and will she be able to kill the criminal kingpin before her serum runs out? A good cheesy fun time was had by all  3.5/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Bad Santa" (2003)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyurNrqSebk

Black-as-coal holiday comedy from Terry "Crumb" Zwigoff stars Billy Bob Thornton as a drunken, foul mouthed, perverted department store Santa and safecracker whose plans for a Christmas Eve mall robbery are complicated by his abusive midget partner, a strange kid who thinks he's the real Santa, and a girlfriend with a St. Nick fetish.  Profane, tasteless, twisted, and totally wrong on so many levels... but still funny as hell.

[Jack]

Madness (2010) - some kids get abducted by filthy hillbilly psychopaths who take them back to their hovel. They escape, get captured, brutalized, repeat a few times. They were apparently going for a "wimpy guy finally finds courage" thing but they made these guys out to be so pathetic and stupid in the beginning that they became more of a joke than characters. One guy's got a baseball bat with spikes in it, but even though he's got two perfect opportunities to take out a couple bad guys, he hides behind a tree and cries. The other one is handcuffed to a bench and tries to cut through the handcuff chain with a saw. You know, one of these saws:



Okay, your membership in the male gender is hereby revoked The climax drags on forever, to the point where my wife and I were MST3King it. They were far too concerned with making something brutal and gory than with presenting their drama in any sort of effective fashion. It's kind of humorous because it's made in Sweden and everybody's got heavy accents, but it supposedly takes place near Minneapolis Minnesota. I'll be real generous and give it a 3/5.

[Newt]

It's kind of humorous because it's made in Sweden and everybody's got heavy accents, but it supposedly takes place near Minneapolis Minnesota.

  Yeah: shouldn't the accents be Norwegian?   

[Rev. Powell]

FIRST POSITION (2012): Six kids (9-19) whose lives are completely devoted to dance compete in a New York City contest with the best dancers from across the globe, with scholarships and professional careers depending on one performance. Rah-rah inspirational stuff that only shows its subjects from their most forgiving angles. It might have had more impact if it focused entirely on the most interesting contestant (an adopted war orphan from Sierra Leone). 2.5/5

[lester1/2jr]

I watched Devil's Rock which someone reviewed the other day. it was like a Masters of Horror thing but less pretentious but still clever. ASpects were hard to believe but they did their best. I watched it in one sitting.  4.5/5

[Jack]

It's kind of humorous because it's made in Sweden and everybody's got heavy accents, but it supposedly takes place near Minneapolis Minnesota.

 Yeah: shouldn't the accents be Norwegian?  

On second thought, maybe Swedish wasn't so bad  

It made me chuckle because the kids escape into the woods but of course the woods stretch on forever so there's no hope of making it back to civilization. I'm like "You're a half hour from Minneapolis for chrissakes, it's all farmland you goofs."  

[FatFreddysCat]

"Wrong Turn 2: Dead End" (2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6umfSLLHs

Sequel to the hillbilly-horror hit finds a group of reality TV contestants lost in the West Virginia backwoods, where they're victimized by a family of inbred cannibals. As you might expect, gory hilarity ensues.

This fast-moving little sickie doesn't just raise the bar set by the original, it totally obliterates it. Way more blood & guts, more disturbing imagery of cannibal family life, and a suitably crazed performance by Henry Rollins, who totally rules as the jarhead reality show host, put this one totally over the top.