Jan 31
During their salad days, future legendary action movie producers Joseph Merhi and Richard Pepin tried their hand at making some horror movies, Hollow Gate being one of them, and it’s easy to see why they quickly abandoned the genre.Jan 11
Besides being very unintentionally funny, Adam And Eve Vs. The Cannibals teaches a lot that your Sunday school dared not teach.Jan 1
Make tracks from the action-comedy Traxx, one of the unfunniest and most incompetent movies to come out of the 1980s.…but I needed the following morning as well. This new update turned out more Christmasy than I intended when a seemingly simple idea spiraled out of my control:
Challenge of the Masters (1976), which is basically Drunken Master without the jokes…
Executioners from Shaolin (1977), in which Lau Kar Leung caps off Chang Cheh Shaolin Temple cycle before getting to work on his own…
Exposed to Danger (1982), about the closest thing you’ll ever find to a Chinese giallo…
Lake of Dracula (1971), another of the surprisingly numerous Dracula movies with no Dracula…
Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972), in which you’ll have no more idea what an Ice Cream Bunny is after watching than you had to begin with…
Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), in which it makes sense for Jacob Marley to do all the work, since there are only six minutes of screen time in which to finish it…
Old Scrooge (1913), in which Marley has to do it all again, for reasons that aren’t nearly as obvious…
Scrooge (1935), in which Ebenezer Scrooge talks for the first time at feature length, and has to contend with the correct number of ghosts, too…
and…
Wolfen (1981), a werewolf movie with no werewolves.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
Dec 22
The international co-production heist thriller Killer Force is a disappointment, despite having a killer B-movie cast.
Surprisingly, the Larry Buchanan-directed what-if drama The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald flirts with competence more often than you might think.
While kung fu aficionados really seem to enjoy Mad Monkey Kung Fu, for some strange reason it didn’t do too much for me.Nov 22
Although Susan’s acting will almost make your blood Boyle, The Christmas Candle overall is a competent Christmas movie.Nov 2
Smart storytelling and characters make the thriller The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud a winner.I’d already reviewed everything from Roger Corman Tribute Night, but most of the Italian Horror Night program was new to me:
A Blade in the Dark (1983), which started out as a four-part TV miniseries, and might have been at least slightly better if it had remained one…
Cemetery Man (1993), which might be the Gen-Xiest movie ever made by a bunch of people born in the 50’s…
and…
Opera (1987), which I was all set to praise as Dario Argento’s best pure giallo until he went and got Dario Argento all over it.
Meanwhile, I also saw all these over the past month or so:
House of the Living Dead (1973), a strange and in some ways extremely old-fashioned gothic from South Africa, of all places…
The Substance (2024), in which regaining one’s youth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…
Sword of the Valiant (1983), in which Stephen Weeks’s second go-round with the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight goes awry completely differently from his first…
and…
The Turn of the Screw (1989), in which I finally complete the set for Showtime’s old “Nightmare Classics” package of made-for-TV mini-movies.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.