And now, a movie for those who think normal professional wrestling is just too realistic.
Archive for February, 2011
Yes, we have big piranhas.
Feb 17
Tiffany creates piranhas large enough to eat a battleship. The fish never stop growing and never stop eating, despite the fact that they don’t need to eat to grow and were meant to grow to eat.
If what I just wrote doesn’t make any sense to you, then I have successfully captured the spirit of this film.
Review Snippet:
Before long, the school of rapidly growing piranhas reaches a major harbor along the river. The carnage is horrific. Not because, as you might suspect, the fish eat everything and everybody in the water. The Mega Piranhas have a startling tendency to leap out of the water at buildings. Upon crashing into a building, a fish then explodes.
Exactly why the piranhas jump into the buildings is never explained. Maybe they are attacking their own reflection, which is odd behavior for animals that travel in schools, or perhaps they are just trying to steal Wi-Fi.
Lesson Learned:
A Hyundai can outrun a Blackhawk helicopter.
Gives Me Chills, Pt. X.
Feb 16
Amazon has the release date for this movie as October 6, 2009, but they have never had the cover available for view. I found it listed on eBay, and I discovered why:
No, the director’s last name isn’t “Hayden’s,” or even “Haydens.” It’s “Hayden.” Why the possessive? THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, MAN! THAT’S THE NATURE OF ART!!
Edit: Oh, and someone with the coincidental name of “Taylor” posted this in a five-star review on the Amazon page:
People making a movie find a curse is with it.Everything goes horribly wrong…in a horrible way. With Jael from “Americas Nxt Top Model” and Isabelle from Bravos “Make Me A Suprmodel”. To watch a preview go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUKNxHJf1uw
Somebody else look. I’m scared to.
Starring Pestly Crusher
Feb 16
Unlike other cinematic H. P. Lovecraft adaptations, The Curse was not “based” on a Lovecraft story, but was instead “inspired”. In other words, the filmmakers took just enough elements out of a Lovecraft story (the story being The Color Out Of Space) so that they would not risk a possible lawsuit coming from the Lovecraft estate. With Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Get Them Draculas!
Feb 14
| KHOONI DRACULA
Khooni Dracula lands closer to Gumnam Qatil than it does Shaitani Dracula, only even less so, but honestly — that a director can only achieve the rarefied airs of Shaitani Dracula once in a lifetime is understandable. And not being as loony as that — merely being as loony as Gumnam Qatil — still means you have a movie of staggering awfulness, featuring a black-robed Dracula in a cheap fright mask and stylish white loafers wandering around, menacing seemingly random chunky chicks taking showers while wearing their lycra shorts. From time to time, Dracula augments his style with an ill-fitting, comically oversized stovepipe hat that looks like it was stolen out of the trash can behind Coffin Joe’s mansion, or crypt, or whatever the hell it is Coffin Joe lives in. I actually assume he lives in a stylish-yet-garishly appointed home not unlike one might find in a Jess Franco film, only with more furniture fashioned out of coffins. Harinam Singh used to come over all the time to watch Coffin Joe put toads and spiders on women’s bare breasts, while Franco himself lead the jazz combo in the corner. Or so I imagine. |
 |
| AMERICAN NINJA 2: THE CONFRONTATION
American Ninja 2: The Confrontation is something of an improvement over part one. There’s very little time during the movie where somebody isn’t fighting ninjas – not much Golan-Globus approved filler here! And the fighting is rather better too. Apart from the early scene on the beach, even Michael Dudikoff manages to throw a few cool moves. I wonder if the beach fight was early in the production and he managed to pick up some skills as filming progressed. Steve James is, if anything, even more bad-ass than in the first movie. He thankfully gets more screen time here, and with that more fighting. He looks damn impressive on the beach as he kills ninjas just by looking at them. |
 |
The Colour Out of Italy.
Feb 11
Directed and co-produced by Ivan Zuccon, best known to American horror audiences for helming The Shunned House (2003), also a Lovecraft adaptation. He’s also responsible for The Darkness Beyond (2000) and Unknown Beyond (2001), both directly Lovecraft-inspired, which makes four Lovecraft adaptations in a filmography of six movies. This, you might reasonably surmise, is a passion for him. And that’s a shame, because Zuccon’s filmmaking vocabulary is absolutely wrong for adapting Lovecraft.
| NAKED FIST Naked Fist is a terribly silly film, but for some reason I love it. Even after watching it about 5 times (and poring over bits of it frame-by-frame while trying to edit the damn thing together), I still find it ludicrously entertaining. Oh sure, a lot of it is amateurish, the acting is by and large terrible and the plot full of holes, but it’s never dull. There’s an action scene about once every ten minutes and these are fairly well done. They don’t hold a candle to what was being done in Hong Kong or Taiwan at the same time, but are still better than what you’d find in an American film of this vintage, or even subsequently. There’s very little of the ‘stand still while I kick you’ style later popularised by Jean-Claude Van Damme films, and it’s notable that Naked Fist predates the whole ‘underground martial arts tournament’ craze that exploded in the wake of Bloodsport. |
 |
And no nude kickboxing, but there are shirtless gold monks…
| 18 BRONZEMEN Those wacky Shaolin monks. If legend is to be believed, they came up with any number of ways to school young acolytes in the Ways of Kung Fu. These were ingenious, esoteric and usually very, very fatal to any student who hadn’t quite mastered the techniques required. No legend is more mysterious than that of the Bronze Men. Any budding monk would have to pass through the halls of these dreaded metallic automatons, using all his speed and skill to avoid their deadly crushing blows. But is there some scrap of truth in this ancient and terrifying myth?Um, no. |
 |
More Love than Craft
Feb 7
Cthulhu (2000)
No, not that movie… Tori Spelling does not appear in this one, for which we may thank the Elder Gods.
Rather, this is a low-budget Australian movie that starts out with the noble intention of adapting a Lovecraft story faithfully… and ends up switching stories in mid-film. To make things worse, they went from one of Lovecraft’s most direct and managable tales to one the budget simply couldn’t handle.
I guess when you’re dealing with the Old Ones, you get used to biting off more than you can chew.
Kickboxers and Crackpots
Feb 4
| NEVER SURRENDER
Self-aggrandizing Argetine kickboxer Hector Echavarria makes what is basically an MMA fanfic movie about how awesome Hector Echavarria is. You know the grunting noise a rutting feral hog makes? This movie is the embodiment of that sound. This movie is an Ed Hardy shirt. Hell, this movie doesn’t just feature stretch limo Hummers; it is the cinematic embodiment of a stretch limo Hummer, and chances are if you think stretch limo Hummers are totally bad-ass and classy, then this is probably the movie for you. Or, if you are like me and just love totally goofy, incompetent movies packed to the gills with tough guy swagger, naked strippers, and dudes punching each other in the face, well, you’ll probably be happy too. |
 |
| THE AMAZING CAPTAIN NEMO
The Amazing Captain Nemo was an attempt by Irwin Allen to graft some Star Wars-style laser and robot action onto an underwater adventure, and was originally made to serve double duty as both a movie and TV mini-series, the latter shown as The Return of Captain Nemo. This wasn’t uncommon in the late 70s; As I hinted above, my first exposure to both Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica was in the form of movies that were edited together from episodes of the show (in fact Galactica managed to knock out three of these, including one based on- the Lords of Kobol help us – Galactica 1980). I have a recollection so vague of seeing the TV version of Nemo that for a long time I assumed I must have dreamed the whole thing. |
 |
Bread crumbs and Spam.
Feb 3
Although I still aver that the slasher genre is played out, I’m willing and happy to acknowledge when a filmmaker takes those tired old tropes and gives us something half-decent with them. While too many indie microbudget genre directors are content to crank out love letters to the trash slasher flicks they loved in junior high, director Mike Nichols and writers Charles Black and Sam Freeman make Bread Crumbs (2009) more than a slavish imitation of thirty-year-old cheapies. It’s not a terribly good movie, but it’s good enough to be a net positive. This despite the fact that the movie is, essentially, the blending of two related slasher subgenres: “spam in a cabin” and “killer rednecks.”