Tag: reviews
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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This one’s played far more broadly than its predecessor, with decidedly mixed results. It really depends on your tolerance for Sonny Chiba and company’s goofball antics (not to mention that bloody whistle on the soundtrack). The only genuinely great gag in the whole thing comes just minutes in and it’s pretty much all downhill from there. Except whenever Yutaka Nakajima’s on screen. You know what I mean. More…
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My brain needed some comfort food, and this fit the bill. To give you an example of where my head was at: when Rocky proposes to Adrian at the zoo and shouts a wedding invitation to the tiger, I was disappointed not to see it in the pews in the next scene. More…
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We should all strive to love someone or something as much as Martin Scorsese loves the movies. More…
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Here’s a thing about me: I enjoy rockumentaries about bands and artists I don’t really know or don’t really care for. They usually cater to dilettantes like me as they survey careers and recount stories the diehards already know back to front and I get a kick out of all that history. This one is a bit different; it feels more for the fans, a declaration of ‘this band mattered enough to get one of these’. More…
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I think you’d have to have grown up in an era when Michael J Fox was near ubiquitous — whether as Marty McFly or in Family Ties reruns on Sky or his later Spin City shenanigans — to really feel the weight of this. But I did, so I do. And it’s heartening to know that, as frustrating it is that his body has been failing him for the past few decades, he’s still him. Indivisible from the challenges that have moulded him over the years, yes, but still him. More…
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This Dramsoc wheeze only has enough story to sustain an hour at most, so nearly 90 minutes is really taking the proverbial. But the undead and their siege of the protagonists’ house are remarkably well done. And the discomfiting electronic score, much like that of Bob Clark’s later zombie tale Deathdream, is far ahead of its time. More…
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I think the California desert heat got to everyone’s heads while they were making this. More…
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I thought there’d be more Cynthia Rothrock in this. More…
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You can tell right away this was made by the same person who did Hausu, but it’s not nearly as unhinged. If you understand slice-of-life manga or anime, the general thrust will be familiar: there’s not much of a plot, as it’s more a series of school-days vignettes with an arc which happens to concern a psychokinetic alien, brainwashing and the indomitable human spirit. So a normal day in the classroom, then. More…
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SFX guy Stephen Norrington gets in early on the ’90s cyberpunk trend with this dubious, tonally inconsistent mashup of Snow Crash, RoboCop, Aliens and Hardware but perhaps the worst of it is it’s two whole hours long and the thing that everybody’s here to see is in it for, what, five minutes tops? You’ve gotta give the people what they want, man. More…
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I wish it didn’t fall apart at the end as it turns into a glossy advert for the Houston Astros’ CSR efforts. To be fair, Reggie Jackson doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’s comfortable with being co-opted by the system and indeed the documentary up to this point is a testament to that notion. But there’s a reason why Black people don’t care about baseball, as Chris Rock said. Yet the passion behind that argument is the same that fuels the fire in Reggie’s heart. Let nothing smother that flame. More…
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If you ever think that churning out sequels is solely a modern-day phenomenon, please note that they released three of these things in the span of just nine months in 1974. And in the third, Sonny Chiba’s dirtbag killer-for-hire Tsurugi has transformed into a karate-chopping James Bond, replete with gadgets, wacky disguises, shagging, bad guys with frickin’ lasers and more double crosses than I cared to keep track of. In fact the only differences would be the visual style (this is superior to any Bond until at least the Craig era) and, of course, the ultraviolence. More…
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Sonny Chiba straight-up stabs a guy with a gun in this one. Not a bayonet, just a pistol right to the gut. More…
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Not a lot of street but a whole lot of fighting by Sonny Chiba’s titular bastard. More…
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The Final Cut again, this time at home in 4K. I probably should have noticed before now that Leon echoes Roy Batty’s famous “Time to die” line much earlier in the film. Anyway. Still love it. Its ambiguity remains its greatest strength. I’m increasingly convinced Ridley Scott didn’t understand what he was working with. More…
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This is like an inverse Best Worst Movie: a fairly dull talking-head docu about a rank amateur’s ambitious effort to make a slasher flick that ends up being far better than it had any right to be. More…
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There’s a level of reticence here that I don’t expect from Werner Herzog. Rescued Vietnam War POW Dieter Dengler returns to Laos to recreate the lowlights of his capture while he recounts his experience with all the practised professionalism of a man who’s being doing it for pocket money for a very long time. Perhaps Herzog detected this from the get-go and hoped that Dengler’s immersion in the places where he experienced his greatest trauma would spark something, a tangible reconnection maybe. He says as much in the voiceover, but if it happens, his subject doesn’t give himself away, and Herzog refrains from probing deeper. Dengler’s a person who had to reinvent himself many times over in his life, with the only common thread being his passion for flight; perhaps this was just one more version of himself devised to meet the circumstances. More…
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Some mothers do ’ave ’em! More…
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A punch-drunk James Brolin gets locked in overnight at a department store where they’ve seen fit to let loose a pack of attack dogs for security, for some reason. Exciting premise, mind, despite the significant legal liability issues that arise. But so much of the meagre running time comprises Brolin stumbling about with a concussion and veering from anguish to mild perturbation as the vicious mutts snarl and bark around him, and very little else. There’s more tension in the subplot involving his ex-wife and daughter (and the world’s most accommodating new beau) as they wait at the airport for a flight out of the country. More…
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Nico Mastorakis does The Crazies as a western. Most of its budget probably went on the (admittedly cool) helicopter chase. That might explain the dire zombie make-up. It doesn’t excuse the dire zombie acting. More…
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David Cronenberg’s first foray into ‘straight’ filmmaking is at once a warts-and-all love letter to the experience of the drag strip (he’s apparently a petrolhead, go figure), a gritty wannabe conspiracy thriller, and a tacky, sleaze-ball action comedy of the type that was all too common in its era. This was made the same year as The Brood and it rounds out a picture of the director’s, well, not exactly enlightened attitude towards women that certainly tinges his later works in a more sickly light. The stunts are great, though. More…
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Totally watchable but ultimately slight, DVD-extra-standard documentary on Madison, Wisconsin’s most famous landmark. Probably. More…
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I feel this is being mis-sold as a psychological drama as it’s not nearly as harrowing as the phrase implies. Anna Kendrick’s Alice, severely stressed by her manipulative partner, is whisked away to a lakeside house for a friend’s birthday weekend that turns into an intervention of sorts to rescue Alice from her abusive relationship. Theres’s certainly verisimilitude in the choice not to make the bad guy’s behaviour cartoonishly monstrous; he’s the kind of basic controlling arsehole, with that straight-out-of-the-misogynist’s-manual negging shit, that most women lured into such situations would recognise, so I expect that to resonate. But it makes for a film with little in the way of story or drama to sustain feature length. More…
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Baby Cronenberg’s most derivative flick yet. What if Sundown were crossed with Us, with a twist of A Serbian Film? The answer is this mess, I guess. Meanwhile, Mia Goth is well on the way to overexposure à la Freddy in the ’80s. More…
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John Carpenter’s three-picture deal with Alive Films in the mid-to-late ’80s produced only two features: 1988’s They Live and this one, from the year prior. They Live is generally feted as a cult classic and a high point for Carpenter, but let’s be honest that Roddy Piper and Keith David’s shared charisma does a lot of the heavy lifting; the budgetary limitations really show in its final act, which renders what’s meant to be a global conspiracy of alien dictatorship middlingly local. More…
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This would be a four-star movie if it had leaned right into the socio-cultural send-ups and dropped the pretensions of verisimilitude. As it is, it doesn’t quite work as either the horror or comedy part of ‘horror comedy’, so we’re left with a drama that’s more along the lines of what the kids today mean by that word. More…
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I enjoyed this while I was watching it (Sonny Chiba bashing heads? What’s not to love?) but I’m not so sure about it now. Flashes of ultraviolence and arresting visual style don’t quite make up for the thin plot and wacky tendencies. (‘Wacky’ in this case meaning one character is a notorious pervert who persistently bothers the only woman in the ensemble.) More…
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Despite what the opening on-screen text might lead you to believe, this is firmly for those who are already boned up on the story of King Crimson, its many faceted iterations and the legend of Robert Fripp. It doesn’t bother to explain such details as why KC transmogrified from flute-laden balladry to muscular hard rock to sinewy new wave to industrial-tinged metal, or extrapolate on the enmity between Fripp and the many, many other musicians who have created and performed with him under the moniker. It doesn’t tell us anything about why Fripp is so important within and without the band: there’s nothing about Bowie, Daryl Hall, Guitar Craft. But in fairness, what (former MTV Alternative Nation host) Toby Amies’ doc is about is in the title, no more and no less. More…
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There’s Japanese martial arts, and there’s Chinese martial arts. But which is better? There’s only one way to find out: FIGHT! More…
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