The October Horrorshow has been a little thin on zombie flicks this year. This is only the third zombie flick that’s made the cut (four if one were to count Resident Evil: Retribution, and I do not). This is also the best of the bunch. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: World War Z”
Tag: Bullet Storm
October Horrorshow: Resident Evil: Retribution, or, Story? We Don’t Need No Stinking Story!
October is here. Rejoice! For this is the best month in which to watch horror films. Summer has just died and the month ends with Halloween. The chill that has suddenly arisen in the air portends the coming cold slumber of winter...or the passing whisper of a phantom. To celebrate, Missile Test once again dedicates the month to reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, or the putrid. It doesn’t matter. If there’s blood, it gets a watch. Welcome to the fifth annual October Horrorshow. First up is a real winner. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Resident Evil: Retribution, or, Story? We Don’t Need No Stinking Story!”
Shitty Movie Sundays: The Last Stand, or, Look! The New Chevys Are Out!
Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t starred in a movie in ten years, since Terminator 3. In The Last Stand, his first major foray onto the silver screen since he ended his time as governor of California, Arnold (normally I’d refer to a person by their last name in an article, but I’m not going to subject myself to typing out Arnold’s last name more than once) plays Ray Owens, the sheriff of a small border town in Arizona. He’s a former narcotics cop from the mean streets of Los Angeles, and the wistful gazes with which he paints his little town in the opening scenes are evidence that he prefers this life in small town America to the one he left behind in the LAPD. It’s either that, or Arnold was just thrilled to be back in a starring role. I can’t tell, but it’s easy to picture the film’s director, Kim Jee-Woon, instructing Arnold to express his real feelings of satisfaction at being back in the spotlight for these scenes, as getting Arnold to display any emotional range at all is more difficult than flying the space shuttle.
That’s not a knock on Arnold. Well, not much of one. After all, I never, not once, went into an Arnold Schwarzenegger (whoops, that’s two) flick expecting an Oscar worthy performance. Action flicks aren’t about nuance. They’re about violence and blowing shit up. Seeing Arnold in anything else is a waste of mine, and everybody else’s, time (I’m looking at you, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Junior, and Jingle All the Way. In fact, I’m not looking at you. I’m going to pretend those films never happened, like Michael Jordan playing for the Wizards or Miles Davis coming out of retirement in 1981. My goodness, did I just equate Arnold Schwarzenegger [that’s three] to the greatest basketball player of all time and the greatest jazz musician of all time? Yes. Yes, I did. And you know what? That’s okay, because while Arnold is not the greatest actor of all time, he has a solid case for being the greatest action star of all time, and that has to count for something, right?). Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Last Stand, or, Look! The New Chevys Are Out!”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Olympus Has Fallen
I’m heartened by the savviness shown by the audience members during a showing of Olympus Has Fallen this weekend. This was a crowd that was having none of director Antoine Fuqua’s shenanigans. It was clear from the moment the first commercials hit the airwaves that this film would be utter nonsense. It appeared that most of the people in the theater came with the knowledge they would be watching a total piece of shit, and they didn’t care. They were there for the shitty, for the schadenfreude, and for all the other reasons that bad movies entertain us. They were laughing and groaning in all the right places. It was my kind of crowd. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Olympus Has Fallen”
The Empty Balcony: Total Recall (2012)
It’s no secret. Hollywood loves remakes. They love squeezing new cash out of old ideas. And why not? We’re a country that embraces the familiar. We find comfort in it. It’s this tendency of the public to seek out what it already knows that makes Applebee’s and the Olive Garden successful properties in Times Square. Who the hell would come all the way to New York City only to eat the same food they can get in Boise? Americans, that’s who. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Total Recall (2012)”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Red Dawn (2012)
It’s been awhile, but Shitty Movie Sundays returns for the first time since last Halloween. What a doozy we have today. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Red Dawn (2012)”
October Horrorshow: Dead Heat (1988)
“These caps[sic] are on the biggest murder case of their lives...their own.”
So declares the DVD box art for the 1988 zombie action flick Dead Heat. When searching for a shitty movie to idly pass an evening, a typo on box art is a pretty fair indication a viewer has found a winner. Any movie called Dead Heat and starring Joe Piscopo doesn’t need any extra hint that it’s a special film, but the fact the producers didn’t care enough to release the flick with a simple bit of copy editing on the box is just icing on the cake.
Directed by Mark Goldblatt, Dead Heat follows two 1980s Hollywood-style rogue cops, Detectives Mortis and Bigelow (Treat Williams and Piscopo, respectively), as they try to track down a ring of armed robbers that have an uncanny ability to absorb massive amounts of flying bullets and not die. The film opens with a shootout of ridiculous proportions to ram this point home, as a pair of robbers armed with Uzis take on half the police force in a shootout on the street. Cops are dropping left and right, but no matter how many times the perps are shot, they just won’t go down. It takes a grenade and a speeding car to do the trick. To start the film, this scene is a total howler, in the scale of its violence and its absurdity. It does wonders to set up the rest of the film for a viewer. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Dead Heat (1988)”
The Empty Balcony: Where Eagles Dare
Steven Spielberg once proclaimed 1968’s Where Eagles Dare his favorite war movie, partly because of its inherent unreality. One of the great movies of the, well, unrealistic era of war films, the great lesson of Where Eagles Dare is that when wielded by an American or a Brit, an MP-40 is the ultimate weapon of death. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Where Eagles Dare”
The Empty Balcony: Predator
Predator is everything a 1980s action movie ought to be. It’s loud, overwrought, over-roided, and filled with cliché and blinding amounts of muzzle flash. All the characters are macho, carved out of wood, and traverse their fictional universe with names like Dutch! Dillion! Mac! Pancho! Blain! Hawkins! and...Billy. I’m surprised there wasn’t a character named ‘Duke’ in there somewhere. Oh, wait. Actor Bill Duke plays ‘Mac.’ Close enough. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Predator”
Shitty Movie Sundays: Escape from L.A.
From IMDb’s trivia page on Escape from L.A.: Escape from LA [sic] was caught in development hell for over ten years. A script for the film was first commissioned in 1985 but John Carpenter thought it “too light, too campy.”
Too campy? Why? Were The Riddler and Two-Face in the original draft? I find it hard to believe that Carpenter rejected a script for this film because it was campy. This movie lives on camp. It’s not light, though. I’ll give Carpenter that. Escape from L.A. is a violent flick. A bit cartoonish, maybe, but that many bullets can’t be fired in a movie and still be considered light. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Escape from L.A.”