HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT (1986)

                                  "Tripping, Jack Daniels! All That Shit Rules!!"

 Being old enough to have lived through the era when heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden ruled the world this is a pretty embarrassing look back at those days. A short video featuring drunken/stoned typical metal-heads taped in the parking lot of a Judas Priest/Dokken concert you get a non-stop stream of rambling loud-mouths, ugly hairstyles and ridiculous fashions it's really the perfect portrait of the 80's just the way I remember them. Back in the day my friends and I made a few stupid drunken videos just fucking around with the old camcorder luckily none of those has gotten the wide release that this one has. That has got to be a hell of a way to be remembered. The one mullet-haired fellow in the matching zebra-striped ensemble who hates punk rock and Madonna was the highlight to me with his well thought out criticisms.

"I'm on acid. That's where I am!"- a wise man

ROBO VAMPIRE (1988)

"Orientals are a stubborn race"-Caucasian ghost lady

If you ever thought to yourself "Gee, wouldn't it be great if they mixed the movie ROBOCOP with a kung fu flick and then threw in some of those crazy Chinese hopping vampires" this is the perfect movie for you.  Producer Tomas Tang was known for putting together a bunch of those terrible, direct-to-VHS ninja flicks from the 80's where he spliced 2 different movies into one giving them a schizophrenic mess of a feel(FULL METAL NINJA, ZOMBIE VS. NINJA, NINJA DEMON'S MASSACRE etc, etc.).  This film is no different cuz you get the vampire/kung fu flick and then as a bonus you also get this crappy action movie with lots of gun-fu.   Somewhere in all that you also get a ridiculous looking RoboCop rip-off guy with a silver helmet and silver pads all over his body that fights the vampires by moving in exaggerated robotic slow-motion .  The main bad guy is a jumping vampire in a rubber gorilla mask who shoots fireworks out of his hands who's in love with a ghost lady.  There's also some water torture that doesn't look too bad, white ghost lady boobs and a guy gets his eyes gouged out by a bloody Curly-style Three Stooges poke.  Trying to figure out the plot to all this makes my head hurt so I'll just say check it out if you can deal with insane nonsensical Asian foolishness.

Fun facts:
Godfrey Ho is listed as the director of this on IMDB but as usual their information is wrong.
There's two other appearances of ROBO VAMPIRE in sorta-sequels COUNTER DESTROYER and DEVIL'S DYNAMITE.

Terrifying fight scene:

CYCLOPS (2008)

Everyone knows that made for sci-fi channel movies are terrible and, of course, so is this one. Even being produced by Roger Corman and featuring Eric Roberts doesn't help out very much. The main problem, as always, with these is the absurd, cartoony, SHREK-looking title monster which just reminds you of a ROGER RABBIT situation. Set in ancient Rome this one's basically a monster on the loose movie and for a subplot you get a sorta cheap-ass version of the movie GLADIATOR. Surprisingly there's a lot of blood for a TV movie. You get throat-slicing, heads ripped-off, a hand bitten off, multiple stabbings and various bloody bashings. I guess CGI-blood is perfectly acceptable for prime-time viewing. Don't waste your time.

ROCKIN' WITH SEKA OR... SEKA'S CRUISE (1980)

Ziggy Zigowitz Jr., whoever that is, directs this porn romp where our heroine Seka plays a sexy stewardess who tells raunchy stories about people she met on various flights and then fucked. Of course, then we flashback to the sex scenes.  It's basically just a collection of various threesomes and other sexual combinations but they are pretty good scenes.  A bunch of classic stars show up including Jamie Gillis, Juliet "Aunt Peg" Anderson, Desiree West and the king John Holmes.  There's one very silly threesome scene with a song about boogieing that's pretty ridiculous.  There's not much else to this movie but if you like classic porn with very little plot to get in the way of the sexual acrobatics then this is a good choice for you.


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THE HORDE (2009)

Pretty decent zombie flick from Belgium that starts with a group of cops battling it out with a gang of criminal gangster types in an apartment building.  Sound familiar?  Yes the opening reminded me a lot of  DAWN OF THE DEAD, you even get someone getting their neck bitten out before all hell breaks loose.  These are the fast moving style zombies though so if you're not into that this movie won't be for you and since they're the running type the whole film plays more as an action movie and isn't very scary at all.  It is probably the fastest moving zombie film I can recall and for an action movie it's pretty good and people get eaten alive so that's something you don't see in a typical action flick.  Everything that happens is pretty typical for the living dead genre though and I have to take off credit for the cgi enhanced blood but it's probably worth checking out if you're not completely sick of zombie movies in general.

BLACK STREETFIGHTER (1974)

This movie has nothing to do with Sonny Chiba but it's still a decent time-wasting, typically 70's, blaxploitation flick.  Every white guy is either a mobster or a corrupt cop or just your average racist asshole and every black guy is treated like garbage and used for one purpose or another so with all the build up it's pretty sweet by the time we get to see a little payback to "the man".  The plot is a simple one about our hero, Leroy Fisk, who becomes an illegal bare-knuckles streetfightin' man to try and make something of himself.  Well needless to say, with all the mob connections and a dirty cop named Heineken, played by Dabney Coleman, on the take, this doesn't turn out to be the easiest way of getting rich.  Philip Michael Thomas who went on to be the black guy in MIAMI VICE shows up as two different ridiculous characters(a wino and a pimp).  While this is obviously a super low-budget film and the music is pretty lame I still enjoyed it for the cheap-ass ROCKY feel it had to it and that musta been a hard movie to rip-off since it hadn't been made yet.  Plus it has a strange sorta hopelessly insane ending which was neat.  It's more probable that they were ripping off the Charles Bronson flick HARD TIMES which has a kinda similar streetfighter plot and even features Hard Boiled Haggerty who also show up here. A.K.A. BLACK FIST and BOGARD(who the hell is Bogard?  There's no one in this movie with that name that I saw).

OMEGA DOOM (1996)

A futuristic, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi action movie with very little action.  Rutger Hauer here plays a robot who gets shot in the head leading to his confusion and walking around a whole lot.  Then there's some fighting robot gangs but mostly just talking and walking.  Yuck!  Weren't the 90's great times when tons of garbage like this would get released right to video?  No, they really weren't.  How does Hauer go from being so good in BLADE RUNNER to so bad in this?  I guess you could blame Director Albert Pyun since he has pretty much made a career out of making films like this that are not on anyone's top ten list except maybe lame nerds.  How he still gets to churn out movies of any sort is a mystery to me but he's still going.  Might not be the worst thing you will ever see but it's gotta be close to it.

Shitty pseudo-trailer collage of assorted crap:

DEATH WATCH (1980)

A futuristic sci-fi film that predicts the popularity of reality television but takes it one step further by being a show about a person who is going to die and we all get to watch. Harvey Keitel stars as a man who gets cameras implanted into his eyes and then befriends our heroine to get all the necessary shots and heart-stirring moments on tape. Harry Dean Stanton from REPO MAN is the head of the morally insensitive TV station, Max Von Sydow shows up towards the end and it's all based on a sci-fi novel from 1974 called The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe . Filmed in Scotland there's some beautiful scenery on display and this is a good movie to see in an actual theater as nature intended. It does however drag in spots and the ending seems sort of abruptly handled but it had some good ideas here and there and is worth watching if you're a serious sci-fi type.

VAMPIROS LESBOS (1970)

Director Jess Franco is one of my favorite all time directors.  He's also the most prolific having made close to 200 films so far.  This is one of his better known flicks and deals with lesbian vampires, which was a topic(obsession?) he would revisit many, many times.  I think the majority of viewers see Franco's work as inept due to the fact that to him plot wasn't always the most important factor.  There is a plot to this one but it's the visuals and awesome fuzzy psychedelic soundtrack that are the stand out features(Tarantino borrowed one groovy song for JACKIE BROWN).  With lots of nudity, blood, vampire hi-jinks and Franco's trademark zoom shots, this one seems to be almost a perfect blend of trashy horror and art-house asthetic rolled up into one.  Star Soledad Miranda(who Franco used in a bunch of his early films) looks amazing here as a victim of Count Dracula that hates men.  She does keep one around as a henchman named Morpho, a character from Jess' great AWFUL DR. ORLOFF and a bunch of other stuff, so men are not seen as completely useless, just mostly, which brings up an interesting stereotypical lesbian viewpoint filtered through the lens of a male director who loved to ogle women.  It's too bad Miranda would go on to die in a car crash the same year this was filmed.  Her look fits so perfectly in the sleazy universe of Mr. Jess.  Franco himself plays a great role as a demented servant who likes to keep women in a basement to torture for his amusement and pleasure and he does make an excellent creepy Renfield-like character.  Check it out for a strange sexadelic trip made by a leering madman.

TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (1967)

This is probably one of my fav Christopher Lee movies.  It's a simple plot that starts out with Mr. Lee getting the spiky mask from Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY shoved onto his face and then drawn and quartered for being a naughty boy and killing a bunch of virgins.  From there it's time for Lee or, as he's known here, Count Regula(which sorta sounds like Count Dracula) to get his revenge by coming back from the grave and pulling some Edgar Allen Poe inspired tricks out of his sleeve including that old Pit and The Pendulum gag.  There's a memorable amazingly Gothic scene with our heroes in a carriage driving through a forest that has naked dead bodies and various body parts hanging out of trees.  The only down thing is our hero, played by Lex Barker, who was Tarzan back in the 40's.  His "acting" is pretty one-dimensional.  Originally titled BLOOD DEMON(Lee needs blood to stay alive, just like a vampire) and I have it on a cheap-ass VHS as CASTLE OF THE WALKING DEAD.  A good watch if you dig creepy atmospheric horror and Christopher Lee basically doing his Dracula bit in a different(Germany) setting.

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)

English horror films from the 1950's are not known for being particularly graphic yet this is one is surprisingly bloody for the time it was made.  I really liked this story of a horror writer who helps the police solve a string of murders but becomes way more involved in the killings than he should and uses hypnotism to do it.  In fact, the movie was filmed in "HYPNOVISTA" which just meant a guy came on before the movie and told you about the magical powers of hypnotism and then he hypnotizes the audience and tells them they will feel like they're actually in the movie.  Hypnotism plays a big part in the plot.  Pretty damn cheesy but  the version I saw didn't have this guy so I do feel a little cheated.  You get various killings shown including a beheading, a heart stabbing, ice-tongs to the neck, death by giant 50's computer ray, death by a barrel of acid and the most famous one, a woman gets her eyes poked out by some trick binoculars with spikes that shoot out of them.  The weapons used are mainly from our main character's museum of old time torture devices which he keeps in his basement and is modeled on an actual collection of that kind of stuff that Scotland Yard actually has("The Black Museum").  Check it out for some super bright red 50's blood.


This trailer gives away just about every plot point:

PONTYPOOL (2008)

I'll give this Canadian horror flick credit for having a different take on the whole zombie movie thing.  Whether it's all that brilliant or not I'm not so sure.  It seems that the virus that infects people in this is passed on through language and in particular certain trigger words, which is kind of a weird/abstract thing to wrap your head around.  As you would expect from a movie about a language virus there's a whole lot of talky-talk and not really all that much in the way of action or gore.  Almost everything is described to you from a radio station which makes it all feel like a play more than an actual movie of any sort.  It is an interesting experiment but I found the whole movie so slow moving and drama-like that any real horror or any truly scary elements almost felt out of place.  I can see where this would appeal to fans of a more psychological style of horror but I just didn't find it very entertaining and just needlessly bizarre with no real explanation for anything.  Give me a brainless fun zombie flick like BURIAL GROUND any day over this pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo.

TRUE GRIT (2010)

I never cared at all about John Wayne movies so I can't tell you how this compares to the original version.  I'm a spaghetti-western fan.  I don't care much about big-budget Hollywood films(Although I know without them all the crazy rip-off movies from Italy and Hong Kong that I find much more interesting to watch wouldn't exist) and I sure as hell don't give two shits about the Academy Awards.  With that being said I think that The Coen Brothers films are rare examples of something interesting coming out of the superficial, glossy cesspool that is modern-day Hollywood.  Their movies are almost all just off-kilter enough to be watchable and entertaining spectacles, even if I don't find them very re-watchable.   This movie is about revenge and justice like most good westerns and is a pretty simplistic tale.  A 14-year-old girl hires a bounty hunter to catch the killer of her father and that's it.  The interesting aspect, like all of the Coens movies, and the thing that makes it worth watching, is the characters and how they react to the situation they're in.  All in all you get tons of shootings(they even shoot a horse!), a few hangings, a stabbing and some fingers get chopped off.  There are a few seemingly unrealistic elements, like, for example, a lot of the characters here seem quite old and fat.  I'm no historian but I would think living in the old west would've been pretty rough and being old plus totally out of shape would drastically cut down your hopes of survival but if you're not a nit-picky asshole like me check it out.  It's no DJANGO but not terrible if you dig westerns at all.