There’s a subgenre in horror/sci-fi cinema, where a limited number of people are trapped in a contained space and terrorized by some malevolent force. They are picked off, one by one, leading to climax and resolution. There may be a term for this, I don’t know. “Alien-type” maybe. I don’t really want to put the time in researching whether or not there is. After all, most of these films are awful. I did come up with an acronym, however. Arguably, more time was needed to come up with the acronym than researching terms for these dogs, but it was fun. So, from this review forward, films where a small cast is in a reclusive environment where everyone (almost) dies, will be referred to as SCREWED movies. That’s Small Cast, Reclusive Environment, Where Everyone (almost) Dies. How clever. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Quarantine”
Tag: Bloody Flick
October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th
There’s bad cinema, and then there’s bad cinema. Some movies are just unwatchable, displaying a profound lack of skill on the part of the filmmakers. There is nothing to them, not even the satisfaction of shock value. Take, for example, something like Theodore Rex, a film I wrote about last year. That movie was pathetic, with no redeeming qualities at all. It was even uncomfortably racist. But, had the title lizard gone on a murderous rampage, the filmmakers may have had something. Imagine that, a film so bad that it elevates grisly murder to the level of ‘redeeming quality’. Truly, a film that must be seen to be believed. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Friday the 13th”
The Empty Balcony: Sunshine
Good science fiction films set in space are hard to come by. So many examples embrace the fiction part at the expense of the science that they lose a good deal of intelligence, and stupidity is death to sci-fi. Additionally, it’s a challenge to make space an interesting setting without working around so many of the realities that make space not only the most challenging environment there is for human existence, but also the most boring. There’s a reason, after all, that space shuttle launches are broadcast on C-SPAN. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Sunshine”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
Along with the title of ‘Official Filmmaker of Shitty Movie Sundays,’ as mentioned in the review of Soldier, there are a few films vying for the title of King of the Shitty Movies. 1983’s Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, directed by Lamont Johnson, is a strong contender. Riding the post Star Wars wave of 80s sci-fi, Spacehunter really is a sci-fi adventure, as the film’s hero, Peter Strauss’s Wolff, is forced to confront bizarre obstacle after bizarre obstacle in his quest to complete his mission: rescuing three marooned space hotties from the clutches of the evil Overdog (Michael Ironside), a ruthless dictator exercising sadistic control over the desert planet Terra XI somewhere off in the far reaches of space. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Soldier
Paul W. S. Anderson is close to being the official filmmaker of Shitty Movie Sundays. I would present this honor outright to John Carpenter were it nor the fact he has displayed far too much competence as a filmmaker in the past, despite the fair amount of shitty films that mar his oeuvre. Other candidates could include b-movie monster master Bert I. Gordon, or even Cash Flagg, as a tribute to his recent demise. Flagg would be an interesting choice, as he was, without a doubt, one of the most unique filmmakers of all time, quality notwithstanding. Anderson, on the other hand, has written, directed, or produced some of the most quotidian dogs to ever make it to the silver screen, number of explosions notwithstanding. The only factor that keeps me from committing Shitty Movie Sundays to total Anderson worship is that he has peppered his career with films that are so shitty as to be unwatchable, and there is no joy in a bad film that repels the viewer so thoroughly that it can’t be sat through without giving up one’s movie-going self to the unique absurdity of substandard cinema. It’s almost a religion in that way. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Soldier”
October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Deep Rising
Yikes. Sometimes a shitty movie crosses my path and I don’t know whether to lose myself in the fun of it all, or to hate it. Deep Rising, written and directed by Stephen Sommers, whipsawed me back and forth between deep belly laughs and outright revulsion so quickly that by the end I was praying for something, anything, to appear just for a moment, a fleeting second, and justify the mystifying amount of time I spent with this dog. Didn’t happen, so now, instead of letting the experience fade away into the deep recesses of my memory, I’m going to write about it. Continue reading “October Horrorshow, Retroactive: Deep Rising”
The Empty Balcony: Excalibur & Monty Python and the Holy Grail
VHS tapes, once upon a time, dominated the space below millions of televisions in American homes. They were in your house, a friend’s house, a family member’s house, stacked tall and deep in all sorts of cabinets upon which the TV was perched — cheap particle board constructions bought at the local big box with fake wood grain or flat black veneer, peeling up at the edges always. That awful furniture can still be found. The shapes have just changed a bit as tapes have disappeared and been replaced by DVD boxes. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Excalibur & Monty Python and the Holy Grail”
The Empty Balcony: Three Kings
There haven’t been that many films made about the Persian Gulf War. A quick search in the tubes only turned up a handful. A quick, forgetful war (from the American perspective, anyway), there would have been no real lasting impact on American society wrought by the conflict had it not been for our recent misadventures in the desert. We tore a bloody swath through Kuwait and Iraq for one hundred hours in 1991, and came home intact and victorious. We seemed to dictate everything that happened on the ground and in the air. The war was fought on our terms completely. Mistakes were few, casualties were few, while damage inflicted on the enemy was severe. We decided when it began, and we decided when it was over. For us, it was the perfect war. Our only problem was we failed to recognize that the enemies of the future could learn lessons from it. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Three Kings”
Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter
Sometimes I watch movies so you won’t have to. I sacrifice hours on lazy Sunday afternoons abusing my eyes and my sense of taste not just because I enjoy bad cinema, I do, but because some bad movies descend so low that even cinematic shit-eaters like myself can find no redeeming qualities to them whatsoever, and viewers need to be warned to avoid them. Like a signpost jutting out of the desert warning of rattlesnake country ahead, or a toxic waste dump, consider this article a harbinger, for there will be trouble for those who ignore it. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter”
The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)
Dystopian future societies are the stuff dreams are made of. They are what grow from the seeds of our own decadence and shallowness. The moral bankruptcy, and sometimes outright horror, of the settings of films like Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, THX 1138, Escape from New York, and Soylent Green wouldn’t be possible if writers and directors didn’t look around them and see the lightning speed with which we throw ourselves into unknown futures, sometimes without regard for so many of the present realities which work so well and don’t need change. The ever-present message is that change, sometimes jarring change, is inevitable. Films that look to the future warily revolve around placing the viewer in the role of Rip Van Winkle. When the theater lights dim, the familiar world of today dissolves into the freak show of tomorrow. The overriding questions always being: Why are the people onscreen comfortable with this? Why doesn’t everybody see how wrong things are?
Simply put, because that’s how things in the future work. People in the future grow up among the bizarre, things we wouldn’t recognize, as though these were the normal conditions of existence, rather than a manufactured reality that mankind has created for itself. The irony is, of course, that we, in real life, away from the fantasies of Hollywood, live like these silver screen wraiths, embracing the fast pace of technological advance, throwing off the yoke of millennia of human history to embrace the dictates of the electronic age. Implicit in films that depict the future is that civilizational advance is a given, destroying the ways and mores of the past, creating something unrecognizable to those who weren’t witness. This resonates because that is exactly how our ancestors would feel would they awake in today’s world. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)”