Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa – Missile Test

This flick was close, oh, so close, to not making the cut for Shitty Movie Sundays. We have an informal slogan here at SMS: Not every shitty movie is bad, but every bad movie is shitty. Skin Trade, from 2014, is not a bad movie. It’s better than mediocre. It’s damned entertaining and on occasion dips its toes into being good. It’s a cheapie action flick that one has to actively scan for its failings. It’s the ersatz stuff that sealed the deal. The poor CGI muzzle flashes and blood spatters; the poor CGI backgrounds in driving scenes; the poor CGI explosions and fire. Yeah, it was mostly the poor CGI. It was a symptom of this flick’s low budget and the willingness of the filmmakers to take shortcuts. I wouldn’t say that it doomed this flick to a spot in the Watchability Index (because inclusion is an HONOR), but a little more flexibility in director Ekachai Uekrongtham’s budget would have worked wonders. Continue reading “Skin Trade”

A true mark of quality in a shitty sci-fi flick from Hollywood in the 1980s and ’90s was use of the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana, California, as a shooting location. Just check out this list on IMDb. The more ruinous parts of the mill were a perfect location for a post-apocalyptic or dystopian landscape. Those portions have since been paved over for the Auto Club Speedway, but they live on in films like Robocop, The Running Man, and Nemesis, a 1992 cyberpunk, neo-noir action flick that, somehow, spawned a direct-to-video franchise.

Directed by Albert Pyun from a screenplay by Rebecca Charles, Nemesis stars Olivier Gruner as Alex Rain, a gritty detective in the LAPD. Continue reading “Nemesis (1992)”