There’s nothing quite like a 1970s exploitation horror flick. That’s not a compliment. Often such films can be entertaining if there’s a sick spot a viewer needs to scratch, but just as often it can leave a viewer feeling a little filthy by the time the credits roll. Such is the case with today’s film. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Toolbox Murders”
Tag: Stay Away
October Horrorshow: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
Woe be to the viewer when a film series becomes tired. At first there was innovation, followed by repetition. Afterwards comes mediocrity, before, finally, the series descends into total and utter garbage. Such is the case with the last film in this year’s Horrorshow, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. From the opening scene through denouement, the sixth entry in the Halloween franchise is a tedious affair. So tedious, in fact, that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pay enough attention to this movie to write about it. It was a close call. More than once while I was watching a text message would come in or I would want to look up a member of the cast or crew on the internet, and any deviation in my focus threatened to derail my comprehension of on screen events. How could I possibly write a review of this dog if I couldn’t remember what I just saw? I’ve stopped watching films after fifteen or twenty minutes and still written reviews, but the difference between those films and this one is that, although I only spent a short time with those films, I was able to keep my focus. Halloween 6 was a struggle from beginning to end. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers”
October Horrorshow: Sleepaway Camp
This film is a horror cult classic. It’s one of those flicks a person’s friends tell them about in high school. The teller’s eyes get big and mature elocution disappears. “Oh, man! You have got to see this movie. The ending is crazy!” No further details are given. The line has been drawn. Those that have seen the movie are in an exclusive club, while those who have not are on the outside, looking in with envy. Then the moment comes when a person finally sits down and sees the slasher flick with the shocking twist ending...and it’s a piece of shit. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Sleepaway Camp”
October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Way back during the first Horrorshow I posted reviews for the first four movies in the Friday the 13th franchise, plus a review for Freddy vs. Jason. I had planned to do a review of the fifth Friday the 13th film, as well, but it was so awful I tuned out for most of the time I was watching. I can’t write about a movie I didn’t pay attention to. This franchise is iconic in the horror genre, but the truth is, these movies suck. Writing about them means I have to watch them, and I didn’t think I could do that anymore, until last night. I should have stayed away. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood”
October Horrorshow: Dracula 3000
What a putrid mess. Films this bad don’t seem to come along all that often. Sure, bad movies get produced all the time. The film landscape is littered with poorly made schlock-fests. But this...this is an endeavor worthy of mockery, a movie that makes no pretense of clinging to anything of value. This movie, in other words, is typical of the quality of film that one gets streaming from Netflix. As Felix Salmon of Reuters pointed out this past January, no model exists whereby Netflix can afford the streaming rights on more than a handful of good movies at a time, so everyone out in the tubes with a subscription gets treated to movies as bad as Dracula 3000. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Dracula 3000″
Shitty Movie Sundays: Pompeii
What a putrid mess. The trailer for Pompeii, Paul W.S. Anderson’s CGI shit-fest from earlier this year, promised viewers an exploding mountain. It never promised to be a faithful retelling of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that destroyed the city of the title. But that’s all well and good. Paul W.S. Anderson does not do anything but spectacle. In the trailer, Vesuvius blows up and that’s what I paid to see. What I didn’t pay to see was a low-rent Titanic rip-off that made me wait 66 whole minutes for the good stuff. And that wait is a problem. Pompeii only runs about an hour and a half. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for the disaster portion of this disaster movie. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Pompeii”
Schwarzenegger Month: Junior
Sometimes, being typecast isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was typecasting that brought audiences a decade of classic action films from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Breaking out of that mold brought more financial success, to be sure, but crossover Arnold never felt like the real thing. He felt sanitized for mass consumption. This is an oversimplification, of course, but the Arnold that was in Junior, the anonymous and final film he worked on with director Ivan Reitman, could not have been more out of place. Continue reading “Schwarzenegger Month: Junior”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Doggie B
[Normally, I’d have a trailer for a movie here. Not this time. You want to see a trailer for Doggie B, you find it without my help.]
Netflix continues to impress me with its selection of terrible movies to stream. Thanks to an unsustainable subscription model, the site is packed full with the dregs of Hollywood. Once, many years ago, I gave the local ABC affiliate here in New York shit for purchasing cheap movies to show late at night. Well, whoever that poor programming director happened to be at the time, I have to apologize. You brought me such gems as The Hillz and Theodore Rex, but as bad as those movies are, they are Oscar contenders compared to Doggie B.
Shitty Movie Sundays: Escape Plan
After a long lull in their careers, it’s refreshing to see Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger unapologetically doing what they do best, which is killing people and blowing shit up, all for the benefit of the movie going public. I can’t speak for the rest of audiences worldwide, but I can attest that in the last thirty years, my tastes have grown more sophisticated, as has my expectation of believability in any film. Unless, that is, the movie is shitty. In a shitty movie, it’s okay for bullets to blow up gas tanks. In a shitty movie, it’s fine with me when bad guys toting M4 carbines can’t hit the good guy, while, at the same time, the good guy is picking them off with little problem using a handgun. In high-falutin’ cinema, it’s bad form to end the climactic action scene with a cheesy one-liner. But in a shitty movie, that’s okay! Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Escape Plan”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Act of Valor, or, Yvan Eht Nioj, or, Stop Shooting! My Neighbors Are Trying to Sleep!
The Oxford English Dictionary defines propaganda as “chiefly derogatory information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view [emphasis theirs].”
Act of Valor, a United States Navy-sanctioned and aided Hollywood film, that the military has also used for recruitment purposes, meets every part of that definition. It is definitely biased, most assuredly misleading, is used in jingoistic fashion to promote the cause of a particular country, and is, despite this government’s greatest public ambitions towards being otherwise, very derogatory. This movie sucks, too, but as much as I try to raise my liberal hackles at this awful mess, I can’t really give too much of a shit. It’s a recruiting film trying to disguise itself as an action flick, and I do not care. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Act of Valor, or, Yvan Eht Nioj, or, Stop Shooting! My Neighbors Are Trying to Sleep!”