Tag: Shitty Gold

October Horrorshow: Leviathan

(Note: I wrote this way back in May, then decided that, rather than post this immediately, it would fit in better with the October Horrorshow. Hence the slightly dated references in the opening paragraph.)

From 1989, Leviathan is George P. Cosmatos’s follow-up to the classic Sylvester Stallone shitfest that was Cobra. And Leviathan isn’t any better. Little more than a mashup of Alien and John Carpenter’s Thing, Leviathan is a stroll down recognizable and well-worn plot paths, comfortable in its familiarity, like an old pair of shoes or the quilt that your grandmother made when you were a child. A more crass reviewer could say Leviathan is a blatant rip-off of much better films, and they would be correct. But I choose to view Leviathan in a more forgiving light, especially since, these days, Hollywood is determined to cram sequels, adaptations, reboots, and remakes down the throats of the all-too-willing public. This week, I could have chosen to see The Avengers or even Battleship at the theaters. Instead, I decided to stay local with my garbage, and rent a fine example of shitty monster movie cinema to view in my own home. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Leviathan”

October Horrorshow: Kingdom of the Spiders

I have a mental list of things I would do if I could go back in time. The standard stuff is there. Kill Hitler, catch a live performance of Beethoven’s Ninth with the composer himself conducting, etc. But those are representative of my more grandiose schemes. Far down the list is finding some way to weasel into the movie industry, and direct a film starring William Shatner in the 1970s. It’s a fleeting obsession, really, and was conceived only after watching Shatner’s star turn in Kingdom of the Spiders, from 1977. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Kingdom of the Spiders”

October Horrorshow: Dead Heat (1988)

Dead Heat movie poster“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)”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Backdraft

Do NOT trust this trailer. This movie sucks.

Nothing is ever interesting enough for Hollywood. If you pitch them a movie about mountain climbers starring Sylvester Stallone, they follow that up by asking what the hook is. Alpine climbing in bad weather just isn’t compelling in their line of thinking, so the movie has to be augmented with a bunch of bad guys who robbed the Treasury Department. And that’s how we got the movie Cliffhanger. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Backdraft”

October Horrorshow: Basket Case

Basket Case movie posterThis is one of the more bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. From writer/director Frank Henenlotter, Basket Case is an ultra low budget black comedy horror flick about a young man and his brother. By all accounts, Duane Bradley is a normal person. Raised in upstate New York, he’s on his first trip to the big city. He’s naïve — green as all hell, in fact — but he has his charms, and it’s easy to tell that the city can’t come close to extinguishing all his innocence.

Duane finds himself a room in a seedy hotel near Times Square (Basket Case was released in 1982, a whole universe away from today’s Times Square). He carries all his worldly possessions on his person. A big wad of cash, a backpack full of clothes, and a wicker basket in which he carries his brother. Wait...what?

I’m not going to pretend it’s any surprise what’s in the basket. It could have been anything, but it’s pretty clear early on this is a creature feature, so of course there’s a monster in the basket. It’s revealed that the monster is Duane’s onetime conjoined twin, forcibly removed by a gaggle of less than ethical doctors when Duane and his brother were just boys. Left for dead, the twin, named Belial, reunites with Duane, and after the two grow into adulthood, they set in motion a plan to take revenge on the doctors who wronged them. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Basket Case”

October Horrorshow: Zombi 2

I could not imagine there being an October Horrorshow without a zombie flick. REC got close, but that and other recent movies are from the new wave of zombie fare — i.e., the bad guys aren’t zombies, they’re infected by some nefarious viral agent. But Halloween just couldn’t be Halloween without a horde of the classic lumbering undead making an appearance on my screen. Enter director Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, the 1979 Italian sequel/non-sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Zombi 2″

Shitty Movie Sundays: Reign of Fire

What a gloriously stupid movie. Reign of Fire, from 2002, is about a post-apocalyptic near future in which dragons have been mistakenly awakened from a cave deep underneath London, and have turned the earth into a blackened ball of ash. A group of survivors, led by Quinn (Christian Bale), are eking out a meager existence in a ruined castle in Northumberland in the north of England, keeping their heads low and trying not to starve to death. They’ve reached a kind of perilous equilibrium, sure that as the dragons have burnt the surface of the planet to a crisp, it will only be a matter of time before the beasts all starve to death as well, and then rebuilding human civilization can begin. It’s a dangerous waiting game, between this meager group and the beasts, caught in a race to see which side can outlast the other. No side can hold out much longer, both heir to a land blackened and barren. The humans have pluck, and left alone, they may be the ones to survive, while the dragons, after all, are only animals. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Reign of Fire”

October Horrorshow: Vampires

The year 2010 will be a treat. In this coming year, a new John Carpenter film, The Ward, will be released. It will be his first film since Ghosts of Mars, from way back in the far distant days of 2001. This has been a long layoff for the director — the longest in his career. One could easily have concluded that Carpenter had retired, maybe not completely with his own consent. The backend of Carpenter’s directorial career has been one box office bomb after another, none of the films able to capture or build upon the mastery of schlock, and horror, that he showed in his peak days three decades ago. His professional tale is one of the inevitable slide that all creative people who live long enough go through eventually. Depressing? It shouldn’t be, because even though his films have kept getting shittier and shittier, he still had the skill to crank out something like Vampires, a film that just reeks John Carpenter from start to finish. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Vampires”

October Horrorshow: Maximum Overdrive

“Stephen King’s masterpiece of terror directed by the master himself.” That’s how Maximum Overdrive was billed, right at the top of the poster. There’s an image of a bearded King peaking through a jagged rip in the side of what looks like a horse trailer manipulating characters and events in the movie marionette-style. There they are at the end of his strings, right above the chrome and lightning bolt logo for the film, slave to his every command and victim to every twisted whimsy. The poster implies quite explicitly that every other King adaptation to make it to the big screen was shit. But never fear, the master of horror has blessed this film with his presence — total creative control — ensuring that Maximum Overdrive is the quintessential Stephen King film. Suck on that, Stanley Kubrick. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Maximum Overdrive”