Tag: offsite
A cheapo mash-up of sword-and-sandal derring-do and post-apocalyptic nonsense, helmed with blatant lack of interest by a jobbing porn director and presumably left on a shelf to collect dust for a few years until Charles Band needed output for his video rental supply deals (lifting his brother’s theme for Laserblast appears to be his only input here, as it’s fairly inept even by Empire Pictures’ standards). More…
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I watched the MST3K piss-take of the TV edit, which only made me want to see the original more. Not that it’s brilliant or anything, but I feel cheated out of the dune buggy chase. More…
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Hard to watch this in November 2023 and not see parallels between its blatant orientalism and the othering that’s driven the Palestinian genocide. Though I admit I smirked at the bit when the evil empire rolls in with super-tanks replete with US Army logo in lowercase, because they’re nice and friendly guys, really, honest, just ignore the communities being crushed under the tank treads and the AI suicide bombers they use a few minutes later, nothing to see here, nosiree. More…
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Set in an alternative Argentina where religious faith has been rendered futile by a plague of literal demonic possession, a pair of brothers have to fight the evil of the demons themselves and the banal evil of a society that’s refused to accept responsibility for the crisis, with the most grim results imaginable. A true modern feel-bad classic that works both without and because of its allegories to the contemporary world’s ills, and a film I will never watch again so help me god. More…
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Jack Sholder’s follow-up to Freddy’s Revenge is another possession story but one that’s mis-sold as a horror movie when it’s really 90% squib-heavy shoot-’em-up action thriller, with some breathtaking stunt work to boot. Kyle MacLachlan’s also great as the oddball sidekick to Michael Nouri’s gruff detective in an alien-human buddy-cop pairing that beat Alien Nation to cinemas by about a year. More…
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The hunter-becomes-the-hunted angle is a novelty, but there’s too much about this retro-styled teen horror (you know it’s for teens as its subtext is rendered as explicit text with all the subtlety of an axe to the face) that makes zero sense, so much it distracts from any tension it tries to build or any shocks it elicits from its CGI bodily violence. More…
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Watched Arrow’s commentary version with Kim Newman and the film’s publicist Stephen Jones, which is mostly “ah so-and-so, what a lovely person” ad infinitum but I don’t mean that in a bad way. The film itself, well… It’s certainly a tour de force for Doug Bradley. The less said about the Cenobites 2.0 and the horribly dated budget morphing effects, the better. More…
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Dumped on by reviewers of its time who had no idea what would come in the remake-mania of the 2000s and beyond, and unfairly so. Taken in the broader context, Tom Savini makes a decent stab of it, changing just enough to make the enterprise worthwhile (the racial politics are dialled down somewhat for a Ripley-inspired feminist angle). But that horrid synth-preset soundtrack is inexcusable. More…
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This is actually kind of fun when it’s being a loopy live-action cartoon. Less so when it’s a bog-standard ribald campus caper. More…
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Larry Drake isn’t bad as the villainous fake physician, but his copious one-liners don’t land like they should; the tone isn’t quite right. It also takes far too long to get going with the kills and spills, and when it does most of the protagonists suffer from a severe case of the stupids. More…
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There’s a moment in the middle of this children’s (?) movie when it turns into a sex comedy and then I was really like ‘What the hell am I watching?!’ Still, I do also have to acknowledge the detailed production design which would look so much more impressive if it hadn’t been shot on video. More…
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A little boy with one of the Residents in his hair teams up with his friends and a bunch of fellow monsters from Japanese folklore to fend off an invading force of “Western yokai” comprising a Dracula, a Frankenstein, a Wolf Man, a witch and a random floating eye thing. It’s classed as a feature but it’s only 40 minutes long so I have no idea how or when this would have been shown. More…
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Essentially a ’90s Troma flick with a veneer of respectability (it was produced and released on the same slate as Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm by the company that would become Focus Features). Would be easily mistaken for Henenlotter’s New York scuzz if not for the frantic quick-cut editing and constant era-specific alt-rock soundtrack, replete with some recognisable bands (though ironically enough not the Butthole Surfers, even though more than one reviewer has suggested this looks like how a Butthole Surfers album sounds). Would I prefer to hear Blind Idiot God’s “747” in a better film? Yes, yes I would. More…
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Not good. While I’ll give this made-by-gorehounds horror “comedy” is produced with some technical and compositional flair despite its pocket-money budget, the leads are written like children less out of the potential for comedic incongruity than as a way to disavow the constant casual homophobia and misogyny. More…
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This is when I dropped out of the 24-Hour Horror Movie Mind Melter for the evening; like Bee says, it’s not Phantasmagoria without Roberta Williams, and this sequel in name only (or rather the cut scenes thereof) swaps much of the gory horror for softcore titillation that makes the terrible acting even harder to look past. More…
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Taiwan’s parliament is fuckin’ wild! Also, this is totally a wrestling movie. More…
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A hyper-stylised Hitchcockian psychodrama that apparently killed its director’s career in his native South Korea because, well, it’s a bit too self-indulgent, innit? A writer lamenting how hard it is to be a writer is never that interesting. It also came out a solid decade before Korean cinema became de rigueur in the West (Oldboy notwithstanding) so one can imagine what might have been. More…
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A Hong Kong vice cop on a camping trip gets possessed by a demon and all hell breaks loose as she Freddy Kruegers everyone who stands in her way. It’s got the expected Category 3 grossness and much of it looks like it was shot on video (albeit really high quality video for 1982). But it’s also got some remarkably stylish shots and inventive set pieces (the swinging, flaming spike balls are an especially nice touch). More…
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Look, just don’t mess with monsters, OK? Moreover, if you murder your adulterous wife and bestie, definitely don’t let your sun-dried kappa get wet. Because then a cosmonaut will kill his colleague on the moon with a possessed sword. More…
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This 1965 French adaptation of the Henry James ghost story was apparently made for TV but looks about as good as anything cinematic of its era. It’s slow but steadily builds a mood until its mysteries are revealed. (And no, the sudden appearance of a black-and-white minstrel is not one of them. Though that might be the most disturbing thing I’ll see tonight.) More…
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A short and wild anime feature to start the Important Cinema Club 24-Hour Horror Movie Mind Melter, with fighting and demons and a time-police astronaut and oodles of gore. And I’ll tell you one thing Japanese appropriation of Irish folklore gets very right: fairies are assholes. More…
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The second one of these I’ve really enjoyed. See? Horror can be good without being mean-spirited! Mike P Nelson’s two-parter is especially effective, and is probably about as long as it needs to be. More…
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There’s a lot of CGI BS in this propaganda pic masquerading as a creature feature (but aren’t they all?) yet also a handful of genuinely brilliant bits that’ll make you go, “Ah yes, this is indeed a Ben Wheatley film.” More…
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A documentary as staid as its fascinating subject appears, for better or worse. More…
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I’ve been enjoying Winning Time (RIP) and this makes the perfect accompaniment; it’s like one long shoot interview getting into the nitty gritty of basketball’s kayfabe era. More…
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‘The poster is a lie’ notwithstanding, this would have been a far, far better movie if Steve James were the one doing the exterminating, instead of spending most of his scenes wrapped head to toe in bandages till Robert Ginty literally pulls his plug. More…
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I half-watched this one on TV many moons ago, so my impression of this grand-conspiracy ’70s paranoia thriller was blown away by the actual plot, which is a lot less exciting but far more plausible: NASA needs a successful mission to Mars to secure its future funding, but a penny-pinching contractor means they’re left with a fucked life-support system (think of all those ‘PPE’ contracts at the start of the pandemic) so they have to fake it. More…
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Even with the addition of nearly two hours of deleted and bonus interviews, it’s all a bit dull in hindsight. Just read the book for the stories to really come alive — and watch The Kid Stays in the Picture, the Robert Evans biopic, for an appropriately flashier take on this kind of thing. More…
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First viewing since, if I remember it right, I saw it at the IFI upon release. I did a double-take when I noticed it’s dated 2014 as it feels a lot older, before Slint’s big mid-2000s reunion tour even. And I’m going to knock down my previous score a bit as it’s only “OK” to me now. More…
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It’s got dudes in flares and a horn-parping funk soundtrack and a whole bit around people queueing for a pay phone, but the most Seventies aspect of this film is the man slapping a hysterical pregnant woman into labour (and then the baby is stillborn). It’s like ‘misogyny’ was a check box for these things. And yet, it’s still a better, more stylish action thriller than the more recent film with the same title that I will never see because come on. More…
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Not enough fighting to distract from the broken hook the plot hangs from. I watched the extended Mandarin cut but I can’t imagine the 99-minute version is any less tiresome. (I will admit, though, that I did appreciate the perhaps unintentional humour of Bruce Lee’s character being all “I will avenge the murder of my brothers! But first I must shag this prostitute.”) More…
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It was a fairy common practice in the 1970s (and before and after) to Frankenstein bits of different Asian action movies into something that would sell to the US grindhouse circuit. Sometimes this worked out in our favour; it’s arguable, for instance, that Shogun Assassin is a better, stronger movie than the two Lone Wolf and Cub flicks it’s butchered from. But most of the time the results were more like the American version of Godzilla, which replaced its integral post-war angst with a hamming Raymond Burr, or like Game of Death. More…
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It’s okay. I don’t know why they kept the other brothers’ identities intact but reduced Donnie from an inventive technical wizard to merely someone who uses computers (y’know, like most people in the year 2023) but howandever. More…
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Worth it for the footage of Clikatat Ikatowi where every member looks like Emo Philips. More…
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Altman uses Chandler’s hard-boiled detective story as a platform to throw a few random digs at stuff that must have been bubbling up for him at the time — hippie culture, poor policing, Hemingway machismo, gangster capitalism — and it really coasts on Elliott Gould’s charisma. Thankfully he’s strong enough to carry it. More…
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Sam Jones doesn’t seem quite sure what he’s documenting here. Is it a behind-the-scenes record of the making of Jason Isbell’s 2020 album Reunions? Or the barest of peeks into the home life of the former Drive-By Trucker? More…
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Some balls this film’s got doing brownface in the middle of Bangalore. Also, this is where Lloyd Kaufman lifted that David Mamet quip in The Toxic Avenger Part II (and made it work better, so I’ll allow it). More…
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Vin Diesel seems to have wandered onto the set of a Warhammer 40K movie styled as David Lynch’s Dune. It’s a whole lot and very little at the same time. More…
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Vin Diesel and company walk through the valley of the shadow of death. And the results are much better then I remembered. I’d forgotten Keith David is in this. The accents give it an Ozploitation vibe. Also, very smart to hide the bad turn-of-the-century CGI under cover of darkness. More…
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It’s nice to get a glimpse of the man beyond his most iconic role, of course, but the best part is in the opening minutes where we get to see old photos of a young Robbie Englund hamming it up with his family and in early school theatre larks. Other than that it’s a fairly rote, superficial biography for a talent who really does deserve more. More…
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More enjoyable with every viewing. A genuine banger which deserves to be better appreciated. More…
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I might have walked out of Versus owing to sheer boredom, but Ryuhei Kitamura won me back with this one. More…
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Some of the gags are *tugs at collar while grimacing* but the good ones come at such a blistering pace that it still works, 30 years on. More…
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A lot, and I mean a lot, of creative effort went into what’s essentially a pantomime for adults. More…
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A Kenny Omega-looking cop with a Vince Russo accent gets brain damage from bullet wounds that gives him psychic powers and lets him commune with angels. Or something. In a film written and directed by its star, shot in the mid ’90s, ‘fixed’ in post to look like ’70s grindhouse trash and not released until 2018. I’m sorry that makes it sound more exciting than it actually is. More…
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Fantastically paced and fraught kidnap thriller with some astoundingly visceral action scenes and even a reality angle (the lead plays himself). Why this didn’t get a boost beyond Korea I have no idea. More…
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I was quite enjoying this (Rockabilly swordsman! Yuri the Pistol! Gun ninja! Shiny ninja! That elephant!) until about halfway through when it turned into The Holy Mountain. They managed to pull it back for the ending, though. More…
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Y’know, I think this one might be a metaphor for Hong Kong’s helplessness in the face of political gamesmanship. Nauseating fish-eye-lens camerawork and all. More…
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This would get a full four stars if it weren’t half a movie. But what a half a movie. More…
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Rob Van Dam is in this? I missed that completely. More…
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