P J Soles – Missile Test

Shitty Movie Sundays: Alienator

Prolific filmmaker Fred Olen Ray is a Shitty Movie Sundays All-Star. He’s on the list for his lifetime achievement in the art of b-movies. Sometimes pumping out half a dozen shitty movies in a year, Ray’s career is one worthy of study for the mutant connoisseur. But, had his career consisted of just this one movie, he would still have a place in this amateur reviewer’s heart.

Alienator, from 1990 (screenplay by Paul Garson), sounds just like what it is: an alien who is a terminator. The titular character is about all the relation this flick has to James Cameron’s classic, though. There is no time travel, there is no apocalyptic artificial intelligence, and there is no unborn savior of the future. What there is, is a large, unstoppable space bounty hunter, played by bodybuilder Teagan Clive, in a hair metal-perfect costume. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Alienator”

October Horrorshow: Carrie

How times have changed. Within two minutes of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, an adaptation of Stephen King’s first novel, there’s a scene in a girls’ high school locker room after gym class with no less than half a dozen full frontal nude shots. High school girls (all played by adults) are bouncing around and giggling after showering, showing off their gloriously naked bodies. I can’t imagine there would ever be a film made today that featured nude teenagers so prominently, much less with such sappy eloquence and, yes, sexuality. It’s not long before the camera pans and settles on the film’s main character, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), as she showers and caresses her body, culminating in a horrific display of bullying after the onset of her first menstrual cycle. That’s how viewers are introduced to the confused, introverted, oppressed, overgrown adolescent of the title: as she is brutalized by her peers. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Carrie”

October Horrorshow: Halloween

Halloween, the granddaddy of all slasher flicks. Not the first, to be sure, but a film whose formula worked so well it is still being followed to this day in countless horror films, thirty years after it was produced. It also doesn’t hurt that, unlike many of the films it birthed and inspired, Halloween is well made. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Halloween”