Here's a listing of all the films reviewed on RSR since my laptop power cord burned out almost two weeks ago. I've got a new one though, which means I'm back to my old pace!
ZARDOZ"ZARDOZ was released at the height of the sexual freedom/women's lib/anti-pornography movement of the 1970s. In 1972, DEEP THROAT was released, ushering in a period of "porno chic." Porn was the hip new social activity. In reaction to this, some religious and women's rights groups protested that pornography was detrimental to relationships and was based on an idea of men "owning" women, that through the depiction of sex women were reduced to objects for a man to vent his lust on. The notion was put out that pornography led men to commit rape and domestic violence."
THE DEVIL BAT"Seeing as how the close-ups are of an adorable, fruit-eating Flying Fox, I can only assume that this Bat Nip substance is Essence of Mango. And to be fair, if someone's neck smelled strongly enough of delicious mangoes, I'd be gnawing too."
HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND"Spider-Gary is pretty damn funny. The make-up is just oatmeal, three fangs, and mussing his hair. Then they shot a lot of footage of him mugging for the camera while surrounded by fake plants, which they inserted any time they needed a close-up, even if in long shots he's in an open plain. And in some of the long shots leading up to his quicksand death, you can see he's not wearing the makeup."
ATOM AGE VAMPIRE"He's also keeping Jeanette under house arrest, trying the ol' Stockholm Syndrome game to make her fall in love with him. That s**t works in Disney movies, Professor, not in the sordid world of B-grade Italian cinema! Terrified, she tries to escape, tries to get back to her ex-boyfriend, who dumped her for being a stripper the night before her accident."
GODZILLA VS. GIGAN"Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa was responsible for the stories of most of the Showa series of Toho's kaiju flicks, from VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE in 1958 up until GODZILLA VERSUS MECHAGODZILLA in 1974. As such, he'd been an undeniable force for the humanization of monsters. Early kaiju eiga had monsters that were, like in American productions, more plot device than anything. Under Sekizawa, monsters developed personalities and became genuine characters in their own right."
THE BEING"What bumped it to the top of the review list was that the testimonial quote on the back was from Andrew Borntreger's review of it over at Badmovies.org, one of my favorite reviewing sites and one of the inspirations behind the birth of Radiation-Scarred Reviews. I should note that the "testimonial quote" on the back doesn't actually appear in Andrew's review. Instead, it takes the first half of the first sentence of the review, and the beginning of the last paragraph, and mashed them together without the appropriate ellipses to signify that intervening text was snipped out. And that, my friends, is called "misrepresentation.""
THE DARK"DIRTY HARRY + THE EXORCIST + THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD = a film duller than it has any right to be. Don't rush out and buy this one, though it's not a terrible watch."
SNOWBEAST"Semi-isolated vacation community menaced by monster on eve of important local event, local big-wigs won't heed warnings due to desire for tourist dollars, leading to more deaths. Yeah, it's JAWS on the ski slopes. This is kind of to be expected, though: JAWS was so phenomenally popular that it kicked off a huge trend of imitators and spawned an "animal horror" subgenre that exists to this day, and is the root of about 50% of all Sci-Fi Channel (I refuse to use the name "Syfy") Original Movies."
