Overall, One-Armed Executioner is a competently done example of Filipino ’80s action cinema.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
Archive for category New Reviews
Overall, One-Armed Executioner is a competently done example of Filipino ’80s action cinema.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
Deserves an award
Feb 27
The interesting and entertaining biographical movie The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio is the kind of drama the major Hollywood studios wouldn’t even think of taking a conservatively budgeted approach to almost twenty years later. A real shame.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
With my first update of the year, I’m formalizing something that I’ve been doing semi-regularly for a while now by introducing Movies Whose Times Have Come. Henceforth, this banner will gather together all my reviews celebrating the completion of our latest circuit around the sun by examining some old sci-fi flick set during the one that’s beginning. 2024’s Movie Whose Time Has Come is…
A Boy and His Dog (1975), in which Don Johnson’s Johnson is pressed into service by the leaders of a post-apocalyptic Good Ol’ American Small Town where the resident young men are having trouble getting the womenfolk with child.
And as for the rest of the update, we’ve got:
Chinatown Kid (1977), in which a fresh-off-the-boat bumpkin gets drawn steadily toward the center of a sprawling gangland conflict, first in Hong Kong, and then in San Francisco’s Chinatown…
Godzilla: Minus One (2023), in which the King of the Monsters’ first visit to Tokyo is reimagined as occurring in the late 1940’s, when Japan was still almost totally supine from its defeat in World War II…
and…
Warlords of Atlantis (1978), in which a pair of explorers and the sailors who mutinied against them fall captive to the extraterrestrial rulers of the Lost Continent.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
I’ll be frank: While Lady Frankenstein looks nice, and has the sex and nudity Mary Shelley somehow forgot to put in her original novel, it doesn’t have her otherwise polished storytelling skills.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
Long-winded
Jan 29
Combining director Don Siegel with actor Michael Caine must have seemed like a can’t-miss movie would result, but The Black Windmill instead mills around in tedium.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
It’s all (about) The Rage!
Jan 19
Sure, the FBI procedural thriller/actioner The Rage is very uneven. However, Roy Scheider finally gets to show off his MMA fighting skills.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
Right after Leslie Nielsen became “persona non grata” as a lead actor in theatrical movies, he made the low-budget direct-to-DVD Canadian film Camouflage, and the unhappiness with his situation is extremely evident from his performance.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
Now this is how an ’80s slasher should be like. Visiting Hours has excellent production values, creepy direction, and a truly scary and believable psycho.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.
Merry Christmas, Everybody!
Dec 25
Not only am I giving you all an update, but I’m also bringing along two old ones that I forgot to announce here during their proper time! First, the new stuff:
Deadly Games (1989), a precognitive variation on the Home Alone premise in which it’s hard to say who’s scarier, the Santa-suited maniac breaking into the house, or the ruthless and hypercompetent child defending it against him…
The Fall of the House of Usher (1979), in which the folks at Sunn Classic Pictures take a break from “educating” us about Bigfoot and the Shroud of Turin in order to serve up a Poe movie with only the minutest trace amounts of Poe…
The Hammer of God (1970), in which Jimmy Wang Yu makes his directorial debut, and brings both his arms for a change…
Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), which has all the characteristics of a holiday slasher movie, but arranges them into something more like a Southern Gothic transplanted to the Northeast…
and…
Winterbeast (1992), in which it isn’t winter, and there are a hell of a lot more than one beast.
Meanwhile, here’s all the stuff I forgot to tell you about:
Blood Feast (1963), which may not strictly have started it all, but certainly took it all to extremes that no one ever saw before…
The Bride and the Beast (1958), the first half of my Bridey Murphy Goes to the Drive-In double feature, in which hypnosis reveals why a big-game hunter’s new bride is horny for gorillas…
Cosmic Monsters (1958), which might be Britain’s only 1950’s big-bug movie, but sure does make you wait a while for the payoff…
Doom Asylum (1987), a lame slasher spoof that not even Patty “Frankenhooker” Mullen can help…
Five Fingers of Death (1970), in which American audiences get their first look at Hong Kong martial arts cinema…
Frankenstein (1984), a lame forerunner of prestige cable that even David “Embodiment of Evil” Warner can help only a little…
Men from the Monastery (1974), in which Chang Cheh and Ni Kuang take possibly the weirdest approach to a sequel that I’ve ever seen, not so much continuing Heroes Two as wrapping a larger story around it, while simultaneously contradicting it…
Five Shaolin Masters (1974), in which they do it again by telling us what a totally different bunch of characters were up to while the events of Heroes Two were unfolding…
Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which it turns out that there are even worse things for your uncle to get into than Fox News…
Shaolin Martial Arts (1974), in which it’s possible to be so good at kung fu that your junk can retract behind your body wall…
The Undead (1957), the second half of Bridey Murphy Goes to the Drive-In, in which the past life itself becomes the focus of the action, as a woman deep in hypnosis inadvertently sets in motion a chain of long-ago events that could prevent her current self from ever existing…
and…
Vampire (1979), an unaccountably slept-on TV movie in which the titular bloodsucker launches an all-out vendetta against the people who busted the art-theft campaign that he’d been running for 800 years.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
An attempt at a high-class and serious look at a controversial subject, The Fan just ends up embarrassing everyone in its notable A-list cast.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.