A viewer can tell what writer/director Craig Moss was trying to accomplish with Bad Ass, but the execution just wasn’t there. Inspired by the Epic Beard Man viral video, so much so that one of the production companies for this flick is listed as Amber Lamps, LLC, Bad Ass follows Danny Trejo as Frank Vega, a down on his luck Vietnam vet who kicks the shit out of a couple of skinheads on a Los Angeles bus. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Bad Ass”
Month: May 2017
Shitty Movie Sundays: Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers
Tom Latham thinks that life could only get better if he just kills himself. Turns out, he’s right! Tom (Nicky Henson) isn’t suffering from depression, nor is he a deluded youth who is incapable of processing the permanence of death. He’s the leader of an outlaw biker gang called The Living Dead. They get their kicks by driving mildly quickly on the roads of rural England and occasionally tipping over vendor’s carts at the local shopping center. How dreadfully frightful. But Tom has an idea that can make his little band of nihilists even more of a public nuisance. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Psychomania, aka The Death Wheelers”
Trumpland Day 119: What a Week
A review of the last week in the Turdpol Kakistocracy:
- May 9, Tuesday: President Trump fires FBI Director James Comey. The administration claims the firing is over the Director’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
- May 10, Wednesday: Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the Unites States Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office and reveals highly classified intel to the Russians.
- May 11, Thursday: Trump has an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt where he torpedoes all the spin over the Comey firing coming from his own aides, and reveals that he fired Comey because of the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
- May 12, Friday: Trump threatens Comey on Twitter, warning him not to leak anything to the press.
- May 15, Monday: News breaks about Trump revealing the classified intel to the Russians.
- May 16, Tuesday: Reporting reveals that James Comey kept memos of his interactions with President Trump. One memo describes a meeting in February where Trump asked Comey to end the investigation into disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia.
- May 17, Wednesday: The Department of Justice appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special prosecutor to continue the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and possible obstruction of justice.
There’s more, but those are the broad strokes. Without a doubt, this past week has been the most damaging to Trump’s presidency in a long string of weeks with not a lot of good news. Continue reading “Trumpland Day 119: What a Week”
Empty Balcony: The Raid
A million bucks must go a long way in Indonesia. That’s all the money writer/director Gareth Evans had on hand to film The Raid (released in the U.S. as The Raid: Redemption). Despite that tiny budget, Evans constructed a spectacular action flick, packed so full of visual and auditory stimuli that just watching it can make a viewer feel a little drained by the end. Continue reading “Empty Balcony: The Raid”
Shitty Movie Sundays: When Time Ran Out, or, The Poseidon Volcano
Irwin Allen had been producing motion pictures for over twenty years before he wandered into the disaster genre. He had a pair of genre-defining hits with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but that was about all the water Allen could draw from that well before bringing up sludge. Next came The Swarm (dreadful), then Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (sickening), and finally When Time Ran Out. According to the internet, so it must be true, Paul Newman, star of When Time Ran Out, was once asked if he regretted making any film. He answered, “That volcano movie.” Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: When Time Ran Out, or, The Poseidon Volcano”