If I wanted to craft the worst metaphor you’d see all week (on this site, at least), I’d say the following:
“Dark Corners (2006) demonstrates that now matter how gorgeous and durable your collection of yarn is, it doesn’t mean a damned thing if you don’t knit the stuff into a sweater.”
But, of course, I have no ambition of presenting you with a really bad metaphor. So that comment above? I never said it. Must have been a bad dream.
Be-Sharam
If you wanted to, it seems like you could draw up a sort of family tree of the films Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan made during his late seventies to mid eighties prime, tracing each of those movies’ origins along three very distinct lines, each leading back to a particular career-defining blockbuster that provided the template for much of what was to come. Of course, while Bachchan would star in films that were virtual remakes of Deewaar, Sholay and Don over the course of his career, the lines leading back to those three classics would not always be perfectly straight. For one would also have to consider films like 1978’s Be-Sharam, which draw upon elements of all three.
Apr 26
Casus Kiran
It’s hard to write about these old Turkish superhero movies–especially those directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz–without making reference to the Republic serials of the 1940s. The problem with doing so, however, is that many of you young people out there, with your newfangled transistor radios and souped-up hotrods, will have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. I suppose the appropriately curmudgeonly response to that would be to refuse to continue this review until you’ve educated yourselves on the topic, instead filling space with horrific, Andy Rooney-like ruminations on how butter doesn’t taste the way it used to and why on earth is the print in Reader’s Digest so small until you return with at least one complete viewing of The Perils of Nyoka or some-such under your belts. But, as much as the thought of such an exercise appeals to me, I’m afraid I can’t do so in good conscience. The fact is that those serials were meant to be seen in a very specific context, a context which simply doesn’t exist anymore.
Apr 26
For the few of you who keep track of such things, I am phasing out updating the Leisure section of Teleport City in order to focus the site on the reason everyone comes to it: film. The Leisure material is being migrated, along with a bunch of new stuff, to The Astounding Cabinet of Wonders:
http://teleport-city.com/wordpress/
Click on it now and you can see pictures of me climbing, which looks bad-ass as long as you don’t know that 1) that’s a picture of me realizing I have nowhere else to go, and 2) some barefoot little Bad News Bear looking kid scurried up the same route immediately after I dropped down.
But none of that will prepare you for A-Chan, the little girl who makes me hate not liking children, because she reminds me that some little kids are beyond awesome and at like age 7 have the climbing skills of a fearless gibbon.
And now, back to trying to finish my review of Pepe Le Moko and Algiers.
Paid to Kill (1954) a Hammer film noir with some actual noir content! Also suspense, betrayal, and a huge company with a meaningless name!
Apr 21
I’m really starting to like this website…
Ten Scenes of Brutal Violence Guaranteed To Make You Laugh
Apr 20
Hey, you know those horror movies where six idiots manage to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, and then they get gruesomely slaughtered one by one, and then the director and the screenwriter look at each other and realise they still have half an hour’s footage to shoot, and then all of a sudden more characters turn up out of the blue complaining about engine trouble?
It is in this spirit that we warmly (if a tad belatedly) welcome into the B-Masters fold Steve Billups of Gangrene Widescreen. Play friendly, children!
Six black slaves rise from the grave, grab up some weapons, and begin killing white people, in another zombie romp from director Umberto Lenzi. Features include, “Waking the Dead for Dummies,” “Zombie Film Cliche List,” and another music video from Grady. Jessica gets all the best lines…
Apr 19
TOOFAN
All of this is a shame not just for the audience, who must suffer through Toofan‘s vast stretches of unengaging filler, but also for Amitabh Bachchan, who so desperately needed for the movie to be a hit. Because, as I’ve indicated, Toofan contains all the makings of a very entertaining film; it’s just that those involved in its creation were too busy throwing anything that they thought might stick at it to take stock of exactly what those makings were. And so a lot of fun, cheesy thrills–as well as a serviceably heroic performance by its star and some pretty well-staged scenes of violent action–ended up getting buried in a storm of half-baked contrivances and unnecessary shtick. As a result Toofan was a film that was pretty hard to love–and Amitabh was still left with a long climb ahead of him in his struggle back to the top.
Apr 17
EVENT HORIZON
I didn’t see Event Horizon when it was released. I’m not sure why. I mean, it’s a gory film about a spooky spaceship. I think, however, in 1997, I saw maybe three film the entire year, and that was when I went out on dates with a lovely Southern belle. Somehow we ended up at a screening of Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation. So shamed was I that I just packed up and left North Carolina for New York, hoping to lose myself in the throng and hide my shameful secret. But the Netflix Diaries experiments have, in a way, become a curious place for dragging my own horrible secrets into the light for all to see, and on the scale of shameful secrets, “took a date to see Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation” is much worse than “burning passion for Catalina Larranaga” or even “took a date to see Wicked City.” It’s probably not worse than, “invited a girl over, cooked her a crappy dinner, then made her watch Black Devil Doll from Hell,” but it’s pretty close.