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Archive for April, 2011
This is a Filipino film about a man who uses Catholic magic to battle the Devil. That alone makes seeking it out a worthwhile effort for anyone who enjoys bizarre cinema.
Review Snippet:
While Lando is talking to the Ghost of Chicken Fried Uncles Past, the Satanists are roughing up the villagers. The poor Catholics are no match for the Prince of Magic’s powers. Heck, they are not even a match for the lesser Satanists who use red radar waves to freeze them (I never realized that religion could be so exciting).
Lesson Learned:
Satan is an immovable object and an irresistible force.
Kaiju, Norwegian Style
Apr 8
When Troll Hunter first showed up on my radar, I can’t say I was all that enthusiastic about tracking it down. I mean, sure, the plot sounded interesting — a covert government organization whose sole purpose is to control Norway’s not-entirely-secret population of trolls — but the fact that it was yet another “found footage from a crew of film student documentarians” turned me off. However, people I trusted suggested that maybe this time I might find things to be different. Even then, though, I was hesitant; people told me the same thing about Cloverfield, and that didn’t really pan out for me. In the end, though, no amount of misgiving was going to actually prevent me from watching a movie about a harried bureaucrat who has to deal with renegade trolls, especially when I saw that the trolls were rendered not as some terrifying new style monster, but as the big-nosed, lumbering galoots they’d always been drawn as in old fairy tales.
I Walk Alone
Apr 6
Make no mistake about it — I know my stance puts me far outside the bounds of intelligent, rational, human society, but I liked…
A storied writer, or possibly a drunk (oh, who am I kidding — there’s no difference), once said of a particular piece of writing that it was a mirror: when a monkey looked in, no philosopher looked out. While I’m sure Dr. Zaius would take umbrage at this gross generalization, the adage stands, at least for me, when it comes to the films of director Albert Pyun. I cannot hate them, no mater how bad they are, because when I look into them, I see myself (a gibbering monkey). Albert Pyun has a magnificent, sprawling vision in his head. He has the drive to express this vision artistically, in his case, through the medium of film. And nearly every attempt at expressing this vision winds up a boring, dismal failure and a biting reminder that sometimes the gap between our ability to envision something and our ability to execute that vision is insurmountably vast. Albert Pyun’s sundry failures are me — if I set out to recreate in film the lavish visions I have, they would wind up, I suspect, looking a lot like the films of Albert Pyun, except maybe even worse.