Reviews

... just because of the gimmick.

Town villain, Bat Haines, pits two ranchers against each other so he can pick up the pieces. One rancher's son, Buck Lawson, falls in love with the other rancher's niece while he tries to make peace and find the truth.

OK, it is an exploitation film in its purest sense, made to sell tickets at the spectacle of little people in a western, but once you get past that you can marvel at the historical significance and appreciate it for the bad/fun movie it really is!

For every shot of someone walking under a horse, or saloon door, or fence rail, there is a line delivered in complete monotone. For every cowboy that nearly gets bounced off his horse, there is another firing a gun from a limp, sideways hand. My absolute favorite part of the movie is the relationship between the villain and the femme fatale with the Elmer Fud accent (Blazing Saddles you hacks!)

The primary cast were putting their hearts into it and this movie has to be seen to be believed, right up to the finale fight between our hero and the villain.

An excellent documentary that starts with an introduction to the rise of the British dance club movement, how it moved from the streets into the club, then moves to the rise of Fatboy Slim and the main topic, the near disastrous, free concert he threw on the shore of Brighton Beach.

Includes archival footage, interviews with patrons, ravers, celebrities in attendance, the police commander in charge, the music media and the man himself F. S.

Having participated in large event planning as both patron and on the organization side I can say it was nothing short of a miracle multiple people were not killed.

If you are expecting a serious scary horror like the Exorcist or Hereditary or a serious slasher like Texas Chainsaw Massacre keep looking. If you are expecting a cult classic b movie horror dripping with questionable performances and comedy that struggles so hard you have to laugh, look no further, blood diner might be to your taste.

Two brothers, members of an Egyptian? Cult, enlist the brain of their dead uncle to assist them in resurrecting the evil goddess Sheetar, by killing women and feeding them to unsuspecting diner customers. The resulting ridiculousness includes classic scenes like a deep fried head, a nude kung fu fight and a club band dressed like nazi's. There's plenty of campy gore that will make you laugh almost every time and copious nudity that gives nudity a bad name.

For all its silliness, it does succeed in maintaining its absurd tone and it does take a bit of talent to deliver this level of consistent goofyness. I was also impressed with one of the brothers... he did manage to command some screen presence and reminded me of a young Bill Paxton.

Enter Blood Diner at your own risk and leave judgement at the door.

From the very first scene of a shadow leaping into the desert air, you know that you are in for something extraordinarily fantastic. At its core it is the fantastically surreal retrospective of fictional Mexican journalist Silverio on the verge of receiving American and Mexican awards for his latest documentary. Every professional and personal interaction he has with family, friends and coworkers is eventually deconstructed as his story adds and peels away layers of humanity.

Much like Forrest Gump, Cinema Paradiso, or even the Little Prince, there is no task or goal to achieve, no plot device or macguffin to chase... it's the nostalgic tale of one man's life experience. It is impossible to convey how effortlessly each scene blends to the next with calculated disregard for the passage of time and the spacial relationships of people and objects. Iñárritu has one-upped Fellini and two-upped Terry Gilliam as every set piece, every camera composition and every performance creates amazing visuals that will stay with you long after you've left the theater.

Bobcat Goldthwait IS Shake's the Clown, an alcoholic party clown that often doesn't know where he's waking up but is a master of his profession and never fails to entertain the children with his acrobatics, juggling and magic tricks. His alcoholism has robbed him of many opportunities including a shot at hosting the local early morning kids show, which sets up a rivalry with 'Binky' an ambitious party clown that doesn't care about kids and has a side gig with some drug dealing rodeo clowns, the biker gang of the clown world.

Shakes has perhaps THE best introduction of any underdog put on screen and then it goes downhill from there... then it gets better.... Then it goes down.... Then it gets better and you see where this is going... it's pretty uneven. The conflict is pretty thin but movie absolutely shines with its portrayal of down-on-their-luck clowns living one day to the next dreaming of a better life and that one big break. A friend mentioned the whole film is meant to be an allegory for life as a standup comedian and it really feels that way. Narratively it reminded me of Anchorman if you replaced all the newscasters with clowns. There are plenty of great supporting characters including the always underrated Julie Brown as Shakes' girlfriend with the worst case of rhotacism since Elmer Fudd, pre SnL Adam Sandler as Shakes friend, pre Sponge Bob Tom Kenny as Binky one of the best villains ever written into a dark comedy and Robin Williams as a mime instructor with anger management issues.

It's a must see... there's a reason it's a cult hit.

The premise... and I'm being intentionally brief so as not to give away some of the plot.

18 year old Sean (Jay North) is being stalked by an insane Vietnam era army vet (Anthony James) who wants revenge for a crime Sean did not commit. At the same time Sean is being seduced by his 28 year old former(literally JUST former) high school teacher Diane(Angel Tompkins).

This 1974 grindhouse drive-in, taboo classic is poorly made with uninventive camera work and the very thinnest definition of acting but there is something in the plot and story here that deserves a serious analysis. In a typical movie you get the main A plot and then a B subplot woven in. This film is disturbing on two levels, not just because of the subject matter but also because they ingeniously pull a bait and switch by giving the A story, the revenge, less depth and spending much more time on the sleaziness of the B story, the seduction. The A and B story then collide at the end. The director pulls no punches and chooses not to romanticize the teacher/student relationship and instead shows her for what she is... a calculating predator.

The nature of their relationship is even more awkward if you keep in mind Sean is played by Jay North who was widely known for his portrayal of the preteen 'Dennis the Menace' on the classic 1960 TV sitcom, a family show. So shocking was the casting at the time, that growing up in the eighties ten years after this movie was made, even I was aware of the rumors that Jay North had starred in a 'porno'. This is NOT a porno; Ms. Tompkins delivers copious nudity and sexuality but the sex is only implied.

The themes of this movie, PTSD, revenge, seduction, sexual awakening, May/ December romance, delivered within the confines of a $65,000 budget, put it squarely in the grindhouse genre. It is also elevated, slightly, by Tompkins' portrayal of a femme fatale child predator. There are no awards to be won here but she delivers a truly memorable performance based on her screen presence and sexuality. Anthony James uses his uniquely sinister face and lanky physique to embody a genuinely creepy villain with severe mental health baggage. Together they carry the movie but barely.

It's a must see for grindhouse fans.

Just an afterthought... while watching the film, which honestly got so uncomfortable I turned it off a few times to digest it, my thoughts kept drifting to Todd Field's 'In the Bedroom'. It could be a Quentin Tarantino style reimagining of 'The Teacher'; Tarantino rewrote history so The Inglorious Bastards could kill Hitler and rewrote history again so Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio could kill the Manson family. Perhaps Field made 'In the Bedroom' to give the parents of 'The Teacher' the ending they deserved.

An unintentionally comical mishmash of the Omen and the Exorcist.

Characters include a Nun, Strippers, A dwarf, an adulteress, Donald Pleasance and an infant that may be possessed, cursed or Satan.... It's hard to tell.

Joan Collins, a former stripper, is cursed to deliver a demon baby by the dwarf that used to perform with her in her strip shows. Ridiculous subplots include flirting between Pleasance and the Nun, questionable paternity and when will Joan and her husband get to go on that Holiday.

Multiple titles depending on which Country it was released in.. Sharon's Baby I Don't Want To Be Born The Devil Within Her.

This film is as visually immersive as it is visually disturbing. There's genius packed into every story element and every frame. Many of the seemingly mundane events, props or visuals that you might easily and mistakenly dismiss as just arthouse silliness are actually masterful foreshadowing and insight into the main character's psyche.

We are introduced to our adult protagonist, Fenix, as he lives in a semi-catatonic state in a hospital. Then we flashback to his childhood in a dysfunctional family of circus performers (his father being a knife thrower and his mother being an aerialist who worships at the church of an armless teenage girl who died in a graphic murder, the titular Santa Sangre.) to see the tragedy that landed him there. A chance encounter during a hospital outing gives him renewed vigor and he again embarks on a successful career as a stage performer, but no one's past is as haunting as Felix' and more tragedy ensues.

For all the analysis there is of this movie, I found the allegory to be pretty straight forward... much the way that Lynch's 'Eraserhead' is an onslaught of pictorial and auditory cringe to depict the fear of parenthood, I see Santa Sangre's disturbing tale as children's fear of becoming their parents. Santa Sangre has a much more graphic and homicidal nature but both films left me with a similar disturbing emotion. It's Freud masquerading as horror and its an incredible psychological exploration masquerading as a film.

I have lived with these characters for so long they feel like extended family. Their nostalgia is in a way my own nostalgia. The Askiewniverse has always been a little rough around the edges but that was always its charm. If you are a fan this film is perfection. If you're a true fan you'll probably cry like I did.

This film calls back to all the characters from the other Clerks films... we get to remember what made them so endearing and we get to catch up with them today.

It's steeped in memory and nostalgia and that's it's strength but of course not every joke is going to land. For every callback that pulls on the right heartstring there's another that feels like a rehash. It shies away from new pop cultural references, instead regurgitating some of the past conversations as though there were not 15 more years of pop culture to mine since the last film. Maybe that's not a fair critique; maybe in the last 30 years there really is a legitimate fear that a modern studio might come down on any IP references.

Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson have always pulled double duty as the heart and backbone of these films and once again they deliver and Mewes and Smith are still the best independent film sidekicks around.

This no-budget genre rollercoaster starts out as a futuristic heist movie, then turns into a space opera, then becomes an isolated man survival story and finally resolves into a post apocalyptic road movie. And there's stop motion aliens.

Wow.

The first half was a tough watch.. it feels like a student film that they are taking way too seriously and yet simultaneously don't realize it's not as funny as they think it is. Only the Hero character seems to have ANY acting experience.

In the second half they seem to finally find the tone of their 'so bad it's good' movie and we get incredible dialogue such as: 'prison... it's not the character building experience they advertise' and my favorite: 'Oscar Wilde... for a fag he had some good ideas.'

Along the way we meet a Zach Galafianakis style stoner woodsman and a Tom Savini biker lookalike.

Recommended for only fans of creative film making with NO budget, ala Miami Connection or Dark Star.

Was an interesting experience to rewatch this 1981 early cable staple in 2022.

Lee Majors stars as a retired race car driver in a future where gas is outlawed, there are no cars and people rely strictly on mass transit. Fed up with living under a stifling regime he rebuilds his Porsche and heads to 'free America' in California aided by a hacker revolutionary, Chris Makepeace.

In '81 it was pretty mundane 'near future' sci-fi about a U. S. that has given up its dependence on oil and gas powered vehicles. 40 years ago the future was represented as the struggle between an environmentally balanced nation and individuality/ freedom of choice.

I think the movie is actually more prescient today when the pandemic and Ukraine war have pushed gas prices over $5 a gallon and California just introduced legislation that by 2035 all cars must be electric powered. It is interesting to see the environmentalist government portrayed as fascists hell bent on stopping Lee Majors from inspiring an uprising for freedom of choice.

Also, I was a big fan of Chris Makepeace when I was a kid and wish he had continued making movies.

You could go see it because it's a pretty tight script (but not without flaws) and a tense, from beginning to end, murder thriller or you could go see it because it is hands down the best rebuke of Gen Z vapidity that will likely ever be produced. It works either way.

Kathleen Kinmont plays a desert tracker that gets unexpectedly stuck helping a pregnant woman escape an all female cult. I am a lover of low budget post apocalyptic and sword and sandal flicks but this is bottom of the barrel. Rates down with Sandahl Bergman's 'She' and David Carradine's 'the Warrior and the Sorceress'.

The acting is non existent and the sets were built with the contents of my recycling bin. Fight choreography is non-existent. There's a little TnA reminiscent of scrambled playboy channel in '86.

Another case where the movie has all the makings of an Oscar winning drama, beautiful cinematography and skilled actors, but it gets so buried in allegory it becomes a tedious watch. High art is not necessarily entertaining and with a run time just 1 minute shy of 3 hours this became a tedious watch. I was not familiar with Haruki Murikami's work before this movie and it left me with little desire for more.

At its most basic the story is about the people you meet and time you share with them but it's full of characters that go through life with a dull numbness about them that was not engaging for me. It was almost passionless, except for the scenes of the play within the film, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Now don't get me wrong, it's passionless nature is by design but I ask again... was it entertaining?

It's hard to break down what makes the silliness of a Spencer & Hill movie fun but here's a try.

They have a charming nonsensical nature.

They have a vaudevillian physical comedy, a la the three stooges. They are able to capture the humor in other people's misery; the more frustrated the antagonists or protagonists become the more amused the audience is.

The love/hate buddy relationship Spence and Hill have perfected.

The plots are thin and transparent as cellophane but it's not about story it's about watching 2 grown men act as silly as possible. Certainly the production values are dated in an era where gross out comedies and family angst comedies rule supreme...but this particular film has some great sequences with motorcycle jousting, a gym fight and a ballroom brawl in a balloon pit... that's right a balloon pit. If you've never seen a Spencer/Hill and wanna give one a try then you should come 'n take a ride in this buggy.

My new favorite Spider-Man movie and easily in the top 3 Marvel movies. It does an amazing job of telling a engaging story and also fixing things many of us did not like about previous installments. Impossible to say more without ruining it for you. See it in theaters you won't be disappointed!

Forgoing a lengthy analysis here's a list of things I disliked. Some spoilers.

1. Every character, especially the leaders lacked charisma or gravitas. No discernible chemistry. I did not respect or care about any of them especially Paul. There was no emotion between Paul and his parents. They didn't even seem to care about each other but each parent was using Paul for their own purposes. Why should I care if house Atreides falls?

2. Josh Brolin and his men constantly threatening the people who got close to the duke even though those people were guests asked there to help the duke... laughable.

The duke yelling at his son about taking risks right after he risked everyone to rescue the spice workers..laughable.

3 poorly delivered or non existent exposition. Mostly due to flatly delivered dialogue. Add to that weirdly edited dialogue sequences with people looking at each other randomly.

4 the dream sequences were annoying... random shots of mostly nothing important. The only thing important about the dreams is to establish he is glimpsing the future and evolving into something else... just establish it and be done with it... stop interrupting the story with it.

5 the entire movie had the most depressing color pallet..even before they got to dune. It was joyless.

6 multiple instances of plot points not being foreshadowed or being discarded...for example knowing Paul's mother knows how to fight hand to hand would have added tension when they met the freemen. The scene where the emperors soldiers float down to attack in the desert..The freemen rise up out of the sand to battle then... next thing you see is the soldiers coming to attack Paul...what happened to the brave freemen trying to protect them? I guess I assume they all died. Another example... you never get a sense of how valued Dr Huey is so his betrayal falls flat. They are essentially betrayed by an insignificant character. You don't even find out why until the betrayal occurs... no tension. I could go on and on about flat or failed plot points in this movie.

I liked the worms and the sense of scale about how large they were you get sucked into the sand as they approach.

I like Skarsgard as the Baron... all combined 2 minutes of him. Even though he was channeling Brando in Apocalypse Now... it worked.

The Coen Brothers raw, without a hint of the dark comedic tone that came to define their amazing works, and a heaping of M. Emmett Walsh in the most nuanced performance he ever delivered, make this a perfect noir in the vein of the Dashiell Hammett stories it builds on. A perfect mix of tension, betrayal and tragedy with a climax that would make Hitchcock jealous.

THE PREMISE: An Orlando rock club band, Dragon Sound, runs afoul of a local street gang, a rival rock band with a grudge and a syndicate of motorcycling ninja drug dealers from Miami (the titular Miami Connection). When their rivals join forces, Dragon Sound are forced to unleash their taekwondo skills to survive. It's EPIC...on paper.

ANALYSIS: Many critics and reviewers have speculated about why Miami Connection is so enjoyable; by any serious standards it is not a good movie and yet if you take it at face value, there is never a moment where you want to turn it off. Is it 'so bad it's good'? Is it 'cult'? Is it 'grindhouse' or exploitation'? I think it's because even the average movie enthusiast can see that they put their hearts and souls into making it. Every scene, filled with horrible dialogue and novice performances, feels like a labor of love. While clearly poorly made, it feels far superior to the larger budget but sanitized, straight-to-VHS content dumps we had available in video stores throughout the 80's, 90's and into the 2000's.

The members of Dragon Sound cannot play their instruments. They cannot properly mimic playing their instruments. They cannot act and in some cases it seems like they can barely speak (Star and co-writer/Director Y. K. Kim speaks broken English with a frustrating cadence that's hard to follow). They do not emote drama or comedy but they try...so...hard! They have one skill and one skill only... taekwondo. And even though the movie revolves around the potential for a martial arts battle at any minute, the painfully slow fight choreography makes the fights as comical as they are brutal (there's plenty of blood and death).

It has randomly inserted scenes that have nothing to do with the plot... but it always has heart. It has questionable cinematography with inconsistent lighting... but it always has heart!

And the music oh my god the music... it's a cross between a nursery rhyme and a Jim Steinman rock opera... I could swear I hear 'Nowhere Fast' from 'Streets of Fire' buried somewhere under the rhythm of 'Friends'. You WILL be singing 'Friends' and 'Against the Ninja' when the movie is over!

In summation, Miami Connection is like that song from that band you hated twenty or thirty years ago but now when it's on you turn it up because it instantly transports you back to a better place... a simpler time...when ninja bikers and street gangs in daisy dukes ruled the night.

2/10 stars in 1987 but 9/10 in 2021.

Shout out to nightowldriveinandtropicalmarket in Miami for playing some of the greatest movies of all time right in the heart of downtown Miami.

PREMISE

Evan Rachel Wood stars as the daughter of two cheap con artists. Under the tutelage of her parents, who relish living off the grid with all the other wannabe 'kajillionaires', she has learned all sorts of ridiculous scams that more often than not earn them pennies for their efforts. When she takes a few dollars to attend a court ordered parenting class in place of an expectant mother, something clicks inside and she starts to realize maybe there's more to life.

ANALYSIS

Ms. Wood owns and fully inhabits her character with all her conflicts and repressed desires and the heart of the story is her relationship with her parents (played by Richard Jenkins, reliable as ever for his solid character acting, and Deborah Winger who has thankfully returned to acting after a long hiatus). There are enough quirky characters and moments to keep the audience invested and entertained but I think it's what's missing from the story that keeps it from reaching a truly classic character study. The parents present as not only scam artists but also co-dependent mental patients, however, we never get any backstory on them and while the movie works without it, it suffers for the wanting of it. Writer/Director Miranda July introduces a new co-conspirator to the team, but we never fully understand her motivations and once again the story suffers for it. In essence it could have been a multiple character study but all the other people in the film serve only to establish the daughter's story. The slow second act would have been a great place to mine those characters for more story.

What's there is great but what's missing could have made it so much better. It reminded me a lot of the great indie 'Slums of Beverly Hills' but with a little tweaking it could have risen to the level of the classics 'Down and Out in Beverly Hills' or 'As Good As it Gets'.

7/10 a fun but not completely fulfilling movie.

PREMISE - Guy is an artificial character in a video game, Free City, stuck in the same loop, with the same dialogue, interacting with the same artificial characters while he works in a bank, which gets robbed over and over again by the actual gamers. He inexplicably develops a yearning to do and be more.

ANALYSIS It's Truman Show meets Ready Player One(which shares its screenwriter with Free Guy) and Reynolds portrayal of Guy as a romantic dreamer carries the story above its simplistic narrative. Its got a great supporting cast with Jodie Comer (if you've seen her performance as Vilanelle in Killing Eve it looks like she's using 1/10th of her talent), Joe Keery (Steve from Stranger Things in a bit of curious casting that works) and Lil Rel Howery as Guy's ever faithful best friend. It's full of plenty of forced plot points like characters suddenly showing up where they are needed despite being nowhere near just moments ago but things like that don't matter in Free Guy (or Free City); it doesn't take itself seriously instead just focusing on its fun premise and the well oiled theme of character aspirations.

Proof a movie doesn't have to dot all the i's to entertain.

I love this movie... I watch it about every 2 years.

PREMISE Clint Eastwood is a college professor by day (before Indiana Jones) and government assassin for hire/retired. He is manipulated into helping the government perform revenge killings on some foreign spies that killed an American courier agent to steal a chemical weapons formula. He's a cold, educated killer which makes him the perfect assassin. It is part Bond adventure taking place over several locals, part mystery where he must identify the correct spy before he 'sanctions' him, part cat/mouse thriller as he is forced to work with his potential target and part mountain climbing epic.

ANALYSIS It still holds up because the script is tight, the characters are interesting, the cinematography, especially the mountain climbing sequences, are spectacular. Imagine trying to film a mountain climb with 70's era movie equipment... everyone probably though Eastwood was crazy.

The only weakness that really bothers me is the hammy dialogue between Eastwood and the bumbling U. S. agent he has to contend with periodically throughout the film... was it an attempt at comedic relief? It wasn't all that funny and it really interrupts the tone of the rest of the film. Some of Clint's one liners were better than any of the goofy dialogue during these scenes.

An excellent reminder that Clint Eastwood had other gigs in the 70's besides riding horses and shooting a .357

8/10 in 1975.

7/10 in 2021.

A fun but mindless action flick in the vein of Independence Day, Stargate, 2012 and Day After Tomorrow. Highlights are its cool monsters and action sequences big on destruction. Weakness is it's mindlessness. It's not high concept or high art but it's a fun way to spend a lazy evening.