KORKOSUZ
The best way I can think to describe the job Serdar the actor does is to liken him to an alien shape shifter who is struggling both to control his new human face and also comprehend how to express human emotion. While buried, Serdar is supposed to be expressing, I assume, the idea that “it is hot,” and later, “it is rainy.” But the thing he does with his face is just… I have no idea. It looks like he’s in the middle of suffering a stroke, and while his face is contorted by the experience, he’s also bored by it. All the while, Ziya keeps coming out to scream at poor Serdar, convinced by standard issue criminal paranoia that Serdar is an enemy. Finally, in order to prove allegiance, Serdar is ordered to deliver yet another rival criminal to Ziya’s compound. Ziya, of course, plans to kill Serdar once the mission is under way, which seems like a complicated way to go about killing a huge dude with a demonstrable skill for survival and handling a giant knife, especially when you previously had him buried to his neck in the mud. In a more complex film, one could attribute this to Ziya’s mounting psychosis, the feeling that everyone is out to get him somehow clouding his sound judgment. But I think, mostly, Inanc just needed a way to get Serdar out of the mud so we could move things on toward the finale, in which Serdar will tear around in a jeep for a while until it’s time to decimate Ziya’s forces by employing a knife, a Turkish commando force, and an RPG that goes “thoop” when fired.

Cello (2005)

Even a second- or third-tier Korean horror film is likely to be well worth watching, if only for the technical skill the film-makers usually bring to the production. This one, though, really strained my patience… particularly when it all but revealed its “twist ending” ten minutes into the film.

IKARIE XB-1
One of the things I love about these Eastern Bloc science fiction films from the early 60s is the air of moment that hangs around them. Unlike American sci-fi films of the era, which were more often than not throwaway drive-in fare, these movies were a major undertaking for the countries that produced them, and were not only intended to be an expression of national pride, but also a source of it.

Of course, you wouldn’t know that from the versions of them that eventually made it to theater screens here in the U.S. Radically edited to eliminate all evidence of their communist origins and frequently retaining little of their original footage beyond their special effects sequences. However, one such film, Czechoslovakia’s Ikarie XB-1, managed to make it to these shores relatively intact. Picked up by American International, the film was released under the title Voyage to the End of the Universe and paired on a double bill with Godzilla vs. The Thing. Unfortunately, those few alterations that AIP did make to the film make Voyage to the End of the Universe stand out as an example of how even the slightest changes can sometimes effect a major difference in a movie’s overall tone and meaning.

Also lingering about the place:

• Magic
• The Pit
• The Terror

I admit that I have high hopes when I sit down to watch a comedy sketch movie. The theory is that if one sketch falls flat, not to worry – a new and fresh sketch will shortly pop up, and the potential for laughs will be recharged. So when I found the sketch comedy movie The Ten at my local video store, I decided to give it a chance, even though the quality of sketch comedy movies in recent years has been pretty bad. It did promise a new angle (all the sketches having to do with The Ten Commandments.) But after watching it, I have to say it should be retitled The Ten Ways Of Making A Really Bad Sketch Comedy Movie. Read and find out why.

… but until they do, we’ll have to settle for Cut Throat (2002), in which a low-budget slasher movie set is afflicted by a killer who wears the same mask and costume as the killer in the film.

Apparently John Wayne shot some scenes for a movie prior to his death in 1979, which is finally going to receive a DVD release.

“If science fiction western seems like an unusual genre, that’s because it is. Thunder Riders of the Golden West, is a movie set in modern times and tells the story of cowboy truckers who hit the trail in search of $3 million worth of gold in the middle of an atomic bomb test.”

Zombies: The Beginning

Considering it’s Bruno Mattei’s last film, I was expecting something monumentally awful. Thus I was a little disappointed when the movie turned out to be merely bad. Just when I thought my expectations were low enough that I couldn’t possibly be let down, good old Bruno finds a way to surprise me yet again.

Seriously, those morons can’t do anything interesting with this plethora of riches?

Ant mega-colony takes over world.

Jabootu correspondent Eric Belzer sends this important update

Creatures from the Sewer

And just in time for the SyFy Network to rip off a major upcoming movie

MegaPirahna!

When was the last time that the FBI was presented as (a) entirely competent, and (b) scrupulously upright?  You may have to go all the way back to F.B.I. Girl (1951) for an example.