Jul 30
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A resurrected review from the earliest days of the site:
In which evil marijuana pushers turn clean-cut young Americans into sex-crazed drug fiends (see left).
Oh! – and this one’s a bit NSFW, although not for the usual reason…
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I’ve also reformatted and added screenshots to FRANKENSTEIN (1910).
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Jul 28
The movie Million Dollar Mystery was made as part of a contest, where moviegoers who saw the movie had the chance to win a million dollars. If the producers of the movie had been charged by the bad movie idea police, I am sure their plea would have been, “No contest.”
Complete with about as much historical plausibility as the real thing– but considerably fewer mead and turkey-leg concessions, unfortunately.
Excalibur (1981), in which John Boorman’s usual approach of smoking half his weight in loco weed before calling “ACTION!” yields respectable results for once…
Flesh & Blood (1985), in which the Medieval landscape is heavily slathered in both of those things…
Hawk the Slayer (1980), in which Terry Marcel proves that the English can make sword-and-sorcery movies every bit as dumb as the Italians’…
Hearts and Armour (1983), in which Giacomo Battiato makes a strong bid to raise the bar on Marcel…
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2006), in which Uwe Boll raises it even further…
In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (2011), in which Boll’s license-grantors take their toys and go home…
and…
Tales of an Ancient Empire (2012), in which Albert Pyun settles the “Who can make the dumbest sword-and-sorcery movie?” argument once and for all.
Jul 21
Ah, dearie me…and I had such good intentions. Unfortunately, they’ve landed me just where good intentions traditionally do.
I don’t know whether the rest of the world suffers from this particularly idiocy, but here, although they’ve long since stopped bothering about region-coding our actual DVD players, they still do region-code the DVD players in our computers; which means that over time I’ve ended up with three computers devoted to the serious business of screenshots: my old desktop for R1 discs, my new laptop for R4/R0, and – in the relatively short time since it was superseded – my old laptop for R2, which are a tiny but significant minority of the collection.
And now my desktop has gone and died, which threw quite a spanner into my house-keeping plans, since I can’t play R1 DVDs until I’ve come to terms with the prospect of buying a new computer just to take screenshots.
And yes, I do realise that this pretty much defines the expression “First World problems”.
In the meantime, thwarted in many of the plans I’d made, I’ve done what I always do in the face of too much choice, and gone back to the beginning:
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I’ve gone back over this review and replaced the blurry black-and-white screenshots with images from the recent colour restoration, which allow much more of the film’s fine detail to be observed; as well as offering a salutary reminder that while the Italians may have taken it to new heights (or depths), it was the French who invented cinematic eye violence.
Thanks, fellas!
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Four years before the big budget movie Air Force One hit theaters, the low budget B-movie Interceptor did “Die Hard on an airplane”. I guess it flies, but boy, it’s often a wobbly ride.
In a rare break from their usual R-rated product, PM Entertainment made the family movie Two Bits & Pepper. It stars Joe Piscopo in not one, but two roles. Which of course means in this particular movie, he is twice as obnoxious as usual.