I discovered two things about Suspension (2008):

1) It takes one of the most cliched Twilight Zone-style premises — stopping time — and somehow crafts one of the most intelligent and technically accomplished indie SF films I’ve ever seen.

2) I got my screener last year, at roughly the same time as the DVD was released. By the time I got around to reviewing it, Amazon.com lists it as being out of print, though used copies are available (and it’s being sold at the official site, linked from the review).

The trailer for the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake is up, and it looks commendable.

I appreciate that this movie takes him back to his frightening, nightmarish roots — the ones he exhibited for about four-fifths of the first movie, and which were subsequently buried under the gimmickry and one-liners of the sequels.

I’m a little worried, though, about the implied revisionism, since it seems from the trailer (though it could be negated in the full feature) that this Freddy Krueger is an innocent, murdered without cause by vigilante justice. That’s absolutely the WRONG tack to take with him. Despite all of the pop-culture charisma that Robert Englund exuded in the role through its many installments, the original Freddy Krueger was the worst kind of human monster: He raped and killed little children. To instead make him a wronged outsider whose revenge is therefore justified in some degree is wrong wrong wrong. Yes, standard issue Hollywood revisionism which makes the good guys bad and the bad guys innocent, but still wrong.

But I may be reading too much into it. I’ll have to wait and see.

Hi, all. Recently I suffered a computer meltdown. I’m still cleaning up the mess. One of the main casualties is a lot of the older site material, which I’m have some trouble recovering, although I hope to get it all back eventually.

In the meantime, I wanted to work on something not too mentally taxing, and decided to overhaul an old peplum review; because nothing says ‘relaxation’ like beefy guys in man-skirts and endless opportunities for bottom jokes – right?

ERCOLE ALLA CONQUISTA DI ATLANTIDE (1961)

When a prophecy threatens all Greece, Hercules, his son, Hylus, and Androcles, King of Thebes, set out to find the source of the danger. They inadvertently end up in Atlantis, where Hercules battles a shape-shifting god, an evil queen who is hot, hot, HOT, and a great many worshippers of Uranus [*snicker*].

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(Oh – and there are some stone boobies, if that’s a problem for anyone.)

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Edited to add:  as a small beginning, I have recovered, re-formatted and added screenshots to La Fatiche Di Ercole and Ercole E La Regina Di Lidia, and re-formatted La Vendetta Di Ercole.

And frankly, I think I’ve seen about as much of men in mini-skirts as I can bear for the present.

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We cannot face more porn…

Agent 69 Jensen: In the Sign of Scorpio (1977), in which the world’s horniest international supervillain tries to steal the formula for a substance that could replace oil as the planet’s primary fuel source, and only a bunch of incompetent boobs can stop him…

Agent 69 Jensen: In the Sign of Sagittarius (1978), in which the incompetent boobs return to battle an Albanian superspy who is incomprehensibly indistinguishable from a Cossack, but mostly just get sidetracked banging a bunch of sexy girls…

Children of Men (2006), in which nobody’s had a kid in eighteen years, and the world is teetering on the brink of collapse because of it…

District 9 (2009), in which aliens pick the single worst place on the entire planet to settle in on a permanent basis…

Goth Kill (2009), in which a Satanic sorcerer’s bid to make himself a prince of the underworld doesn’t go quite according to plan…

In the Sign of the Gemini (1975), in which two record company bosses embroil themselves in a series of ridiculous misadventures while competing to sign a popular cabaret singer, and there’s an enormous amount of screwing…

In the Sign of the Lion (1976), in which two batty old ladies who used to be the hottest thing in town cause a monumental scandal by publishing a novelization of their youthful sexual adventures under their young cousin’s name…

In the Sign of the Taurus (1974), in which a filthy-minded old count turns his village upside down by making the bequest of his property contingent upon the birth of an illegitimate child within a narrow window of opportunity…

and…

Six-String Samurai (1998), in which Buddy Holly battles the Grim Reaper (who’s really more of a Grim Shredder in the present context) for rulership of a post-apocalyptic America.

The Superfriends face five challenges at the hands of an alien refugee from an old Star Trek episode, and while we expect Aquaman to be totally humiliated, it’s Apache Chief who really takes it in the man-skirt.  Join us as the Superfriends face The Final Challenge.

Most everyone tout’s Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964) as a classic. I, naturally, have to be a contrarian. Not that I have any major complaints; I just think the movie is missing something, or I am.

What do you mean that roundtable was last month?  Screw ya’all.  Anyway, I wanted to include a ’50s sci-fi movie I hadn’t seen, and believe it or not, the two most well known flicks that fit that category were The Alligator People and The Cyclops.  And the latter was a Bert I. Gordon flick, so no contest, really.

HIGH ROAD TO CHINA

As far as consolation prizes go, High Road to China is definitely a consolation prize, but not an altogether bad one. Though it looks relatively low budget when compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, it still manages to have just enough budget to keep from looking totally cheap. Things would have been a lot better looking if the director hadn’t opted for that dainty sort of washed-out brown-and-cream color palette that looks more at home in a ponderous Merchant-Ivory production about people struggling to come to grips with their mild dislike of tea. It’s a style of filming that seems to have been particularly common for films in the 1980s that were set in the 1920s. Instead of cheering as the hero punches out bad guys and swings over pits full of snakes and hyraxes, you spend most of your time worrying that tough-but-lovable Tom Selleck is going to get crumpet crumbs on the doilies (crumpets have crumbs, right?), making Aunt Martha slightly disappointed, though she would never show such bold emotion in the company of others. But that said, as far asRaiders rip-offs go, this is one of the better ones. It helps that, though the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark is obviously why the movie got made, the movie itself doesn’t feel the need to copy the plot other than being about a lovable rogue adventurin’ around in some past time period.

DYNAMITE JOHNSON

Dynamite Johnson is pretty much a textbook example of a filmmaker proving his exploitation acumen by making the most of both his resources and concept. “What textbook?,” I hear you ask. “Where can I get it? Will I be tested on this?” Shut up. No such book exists. But if it did, you could certainly do worse than having Filipino producer, director and writer Bobby Suarez as its author.

Dynamite Johnson was the third film to be turned out by Suarez’s BAS Film Productions, following closely on the heels of 1977’s The Bionic Boy and the next year’s They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong. Both of the previous films were completed with the financial participation of Singaporean wrestling-promoter-turned-independent-film-producer Sunny Lim, and, while they were primarily Filipino productions, they made concessions to the Singaporean market by drawing from that country’s talent pool for their titular stars. In the case of The Bionic Boy, that star was a 9 year old Singaporean Karate champion by the name of Johnson Yap, and in Cleopatra Wong’s it was an 18 year old typist-turned-fledgling-martial-arts-star named Doris Young, who was summarily rechristened Marrie Lee in order to encourage those all-important Bruce Lee associations.