Dumb 80s movie about a jive-talking imp(alternate title- THE IMP) that gets released from a bowling trophy by some stupid college kids(one of which seems to be a chubby Bill Paxton impersonator) and then turns them into murderous demons(one of which looks like The Bride of Frankenstein for some reason). Linnea Quigley also shows up as a punk chick with a bad attitude. Disappointingly she does not get naked. Luckily there's other boobs and asses on display to raise the entertainment quotient. Thanks Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens. Not the worst thing you would see on USA's Up All Night program back in the day but don't expect a timeless horror classic.
My most fond memory of this film is watching a 16 millimeter print of it with star Austin Stoker in attendance at a horror convention about 15 years ago. An early John Carpenter film(his 2nd full-length feature) this one is technically an action film but it has the pacing and feel of a horror flick. Clearly influenced by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD with its "group trapped in a building surrounded by the enemy"-plot. It works great no matter how derivative it may be and was the start to a great many superior Carpenter films(up until the 90s anyway). You get a child shooting, tons of gunfights, stupid gang-members who apparently don't mind being cannon-fodder, a great anti-hero character played by Darwin Joston who I can't say has really stood out in anything else I'd seen him in(which is mostly various T.V. stuff), and a typically quirky but appropriate soundtrack by Mr. Carpenter himself.
Known in Italy as DISTRICT 13: THE BRIGADE OF DEATH!:
This starts out with a kid strangling a cat to death in a bowl of milk. From there we find out he had a pretty shitty upbringing by his mum(40s starlet Lana Turner in another example of 70s "hag-horror" a genre many old-timey actresses ended in at the time). It turns out mom is quite a bit nutty and has some revenge plans of her own which include baby-killing, regular-killing and hiring a prostitute to seduce her son and wreck his marriage(but not necessarily in that order). This one is a pretty big downer of a film with not many characters to sympathize with. It's hard not to feel a little bad for old Lana, especially in scenes where she reminisces about how beautiful she once was but I guess that's how Hollywood rolled in those days. Despite it's fairly slow pace(typical British cinema!) it is bizarre enough for one viewing and the ending is pretty far out there. AKA PERSECUTION and THE TERROR OF SHEBA
Squiggle-vision Trailer!:
Glorious VHS box cover which makes it seem more like a horror film than the thriller that it is:
This is a weird one. It's sort-of a mix between some stupid Disney family film about lions and a horrific animals-attack film. Tippi Hedren(of THE BIRDS fame) and Melanie Griffith(her daughter) are the 2 big names in this. The rest of her family, her husband Noel Marshal and 2 sons John and Jerry, are also featured and do most of the various hardcore wrasslin with lions and tigers but the gals are not spared and end up being tossed around by an elephant when not being hunted down by the big cats.(Griffith apparently ended up needing plastic surgery to her face after a lion attack) While beautifully shot in California, which doubles for Africa in the film, I couldn't help but feel nervous as hell while watching this thing that someone was going to get mauled to death. I'm sure the intention was to show how man can live in harmony with nature but I think that message gets instantly lost when we see the families patriarch, Noel, getting one of his hands bloodily ripped open by some over-rambunctious feline killing machines. You can't help but ask yourself why any sane human would subject their family to this kind of treatment but maybe it made some kinda hippie conservationist-sense back in 1970 when they originally started filming this thing(it took 11 years to complete!). Overall it doesn't seem worth the risk to me to make such an absurd film but it certainly is a unique spectacle.
Didn't seem all that comedic to me but they do add some cartoonish music to give it that feeling!:
I've never been a big fan of Steven Seagal for a couple of reasons. The main one is that I never felt he had the charisma to be a big action star. I mean next to Stallone or Schwarzenegger(or even a Chuck Norris) he really pales in comparison. Also most of his big movies were made in the 90s when cinema in American was at a real low-point. Having successfully avoided his movies for all these years I finally sat through this one at a recent drunken-movie night gathering of a few friends. With the right intoxicants this one was at least mildly amusing despite the dreadful music. William Forsythe as the insane mafioso bad-guy who shoots innocent women in the head at traffic stops really helps up the entertainment value here. There's also a bit of extreme violence including a meat cleaver to the hand and a guy who gets one of his legs blown off by a shotgun. Seagal himself is pretty annoying though with his ultra-fake Brooklyn accent. Maybe if I watch that movie he made with Pam Grier one day I'll at least grow to tolerate him more.
Not being a very big fan of the 90s this one is a bit rough for me. It basically reminds me of every industrial music video from that decade complete with the drab black and white camerawork, the shaky cam and of course the atonal music. The saving grace is that director Darren Aronofsky at least packs some interesting ideas in this intentionally nihilistic exercise about chaos vs. order in the natural world and the thin line between brilliance and insane nutiness. So that's probably why I've seen it twice now in 20 years. In all that time I forgot about the unpleasantness of it all. Speaking of which most of the characters in this are pretty unlikable and tough to relate to or want to spend time around but I'm sure that's intentional and mirrors society in some ways. All in all an interesting if not very enjoyable independent film experiment that math nerds and/or artsy-fartsy film snobs may appreciate a bit more than me.
I'd seen the clip of Charles Bronson fighting(or more accurately getting his ass kicked by) Toshiro Mifune before but now I've finally seen it in context. This euro-western is a pretty star-studded affair with east meeting west (Bronson and Mifune) along with bad guy (Alain Delon) and love interest/prostitute (Ursula Andress) who all end up in a search for some gold(or in Mifune's case a golden samurai sword). It's a pretty epic tale with double-crosses and a rare chance to see some samurai vs. indians action. As usual Bronson doesn't disappoint me.
Not to be confused with that stupid 80s vampire movie with the similar title, this one is a stupid 60s movie with a monster who looks like a gorilla wearing an alien mask running around killing swinging 60s teens. The mighty John Agar(from a billion other monster and sci-fi movies of the 50s and 60s) stars as the sheriff who has to figure out how many bullets it takes to stop this rampaging mutant animal who crash landed from space after being sent their in some kinda weird Noah's Ark experiment with a bunch of other animals. What the purpose of this space zoo was I'm not exactly sure(something about testing the effects of radiation?) but it makes for a good enough, if not goofy, excuse for what's going on as anything else. Pretty brainless but entertaining enough for a hungover Sunday morning viewing. Just expect a lot of very bad-lighting in many scenes which I'm guessing was to describe the very minimalist creature design.
This is purportedly a remake of 1964's THE DEMON FROM DEVIL'S LAKE but that's an even more obscure film than this one, and that's saying a lot!
This got re-released in the 80s on VHS over in England as E.T.N., THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL NASTIE to try and cash in on all that lucrative E.T. money that was going around at the time. I can only imagine how disappointed some kid woulda been back then thinking he was gonna see some gore-filled monster romp when this thing started playing.
This is the 2nd film in the GIRL BOSS series. I've watched these in a pretty backwards fashion so it's hard not to get some sense of deja-vu as I see more of them this way. They seem to borrow elements and then add to them as the series goes on. This one focuses on two warring Japanese gal gangs who run afoul of the Yakuza. Things do not turn out very well for anyone as the movie goes on. Bottles are shoved in vaginas, hot candle wax is dripped on nipples and women are generally treated pretty shabbily which will make any feminists watching cry. This one is pretty basic and I think these get better as the series goes on but I do still need to watch the original entry just to make sure. AKA QUEEN BEE'S CHALLENGE Followed by GIRL BOSS GUERILLA
So this one is kinda like if you took that movie CLASS OF 1984 added Linda Blair and then shoehorned a slasher movie into the middle of it. It starts out with a very anti-social gang of "punkers" wiping out Miss Blair's family. Then seemingly out of nowhere a mutant retard killer, who just happens to live in a secret room behind the family's bookcase is revealed who deals out some revenge. This all sounds pretty dumb when I type it out but it works entertainingly enough in the film itself that I would recommend it to not-very-discriminating fans of 80s horror. Tab Hunter eventually shows up as a relative of the slain family to add his own brand of twisted vengeance on these punk hooligans(one of which is MANIAC COP himself, Robert Z'Dar.
There's an extended, and apparently more obscure, version of this film where the camera pulls back at the end revealing it to all have just been a movie that The Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster were watching. Genius!
This 1980s Canadian slasher flick has sentimental value to me since I remember it from back in the VHS rental days when it was a fairly new release. The best part of the film tales place before the opening credits even role. You get a rape and a revenge(thanks to some some very bitey canines) and then the main story focuses on a group of typical slasher movie victims-to-be who end up crashing on the island where our large retarded (and growly) man-monster lives(the product of the pre-credit rape scene if you couldn't guess). It's a surprisingly not-very gory(with the exclusion of the dogs chomping the rapist and one head squishing scene) experience and the crappy bootleg DVD I have of this is pretty dark and murky during many scenes(which is pretty reminiscent of how it looked on video tape) so maybe there's some added grue in the high-def version. There is an unrated version which apparently adds a bit of violence and more gratuitous shots of the raping. Very standard as far as slasher movies of the era go.
Sometimes a classy fellow like myself will watch a horror movie just because a lady friend wants to see the new trendy thing that is all the rage. Well, this is the latest "flavor of the week" that is creating lots of buzz on social media and like everything else that is currently so very important on Facebook-like websites I'm certain it will be completely forgotten within a week or two. Calling this film a horror flick is also being a bit generous as it really seems to be more akin to something like THE WALKING DEAD t.v. program(which was similarly on the tip of everyone's tongue up until recently when it seems to have disappeared from most folk's radar) which is just a soap-opera-ish end of the world thriller with intermittent scenes of tense terror. There are a couple of bloody moments here though, most notably an old lady who scissors her own neck to death, that keep it from being a total Lifetime "movie for women" situation, so that's nice. At over 2 hours though I couldn't help but feel this coulda been edited down quite a bit and maybe even told in a more linear fashion. My favorite bits involved John Malkovich as a grumpy fuck who is pretty much right about everything. There are way worse modern things you could watch but maybe wait a while so you don't look like some kinda hipster bandwagon-jumper!
