Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Vampire Lovers


Necklines plunge in this sapphic Hammer Horror film. Apparitions clad in shrouds roam misty cemeteries, and chain-link fences encircle tennis courts in the 1700s. After a fake fur with eyes climbs in bed with a young girl, she suddenly becomes ill and weak, and naturally her doctor prescribes a glass of port because that was considered both medicine and blood-thickening food back then. How did we as a species survive vampire attacks in the 1700s if the only people who were capable of curing illnesses went from estate to estate both drinking and prescribing port? Since necklines plunged to women's bellybuttons 300 years ago, why was it hard to diagnose a bad case of breast-biting vampirism since everyone's cans were on display? I don't know. Anyway, no one seems to suspect the couch-surfing, well-appointed lady vampire wearing see-thru negligees, and she roams from estate to estate like a port-drinking doctor causing governesses to rend their toast, probably because the aristocracy were reticent in the 1700s to kick negligee-wearing lady vampires to the curb due to appreciating the lacy, well-appointed view, and probably because they all drank too much port. Can you blame them, really? Are you going to throw a sunset or an oil painting or an oil painting of a sunset out with the bathwater just because that lacy oil painting of a well-appointed sunset might drain you of blood, causing you to waste away in your bed and die a hideous 18th-century death with the port painfully out of reach? No, I don't think so. They know what side their toast is buttered on.




Friday, September 26, 2014

The Boxer's Omen


A kickboxing monk battles an evil magician in this stylish, action-packed Shaw Brothers horror film.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. Actually, this review is all spoilers.

I'm beginning to try to make my way through this list of weirdest movies ever made, and I was very doubtful they could be all that weird.

http://flavorwire.com/476770/the-50-weirdest-movies-ever-made/

Well, the gauntlet is thrown with this Shaw Brothers film, as it hauls out everything but the kitchen sink in order to bewilder, shock, offend, and freak out the viewer. It succeeds. I loved it.

There's kickboxing, someone getting suspended upside down with their head in a bucket of water, golden floating apparitions, a rainbow disc that attaches itself to someone's forehead causing their skin to balloon and bats to crawl out of their mouth, rat eating, people climbing walls, evil spirits, spiders, snakes, poison darts in the eyes, glowing smoldering corpses, someone vomiting an eel, someone covered in leeches, chicken sacrifice, a monk being strangled by the neck veins of a severed levitating head, alligator dissection, banana peel regurgitation, and maggots pouring from someone's eye sockets.

The Boxer's Omen is highly recommended, but it's highly recommended you don't watch it while high.

Here's a NSFC (not safe for chickens) trailer.



Werewolf Of Washington


Dean Stockwell's formidable & aptly cast eyebrows star in this absurd horror-comedy. The eyebrows play a junior press corp member who has an affair with the President's daughter, which naturally forces him to relocate to Budapest. While in Budapest, he almost runs into a motorcycle parked in the road, and he gently crashes into a tree. After a completely original turn of events not based on any previously published work, Dean is bitten by a werewolf and the natural thing to do is fly back to Washington. Suddenly, an irritating woman is found dead in a shopping cart. After riding atop the roof of a moving car, the werewolf kills another irritating woman at the Mobil station in slo-mo, and some unfortunate 1970s racial profiling happens. It's not very interesting.

Someone leaves a moon lander in the lavatory, and Dean has a panting, camera shadow and tic-filled werewolf transformation while talking on a princess phone and sitting in a rattan rocker. Then he licks a telephone booth.

After a little Who's On First-style repartee with a distracted President while straddling the gutter of a bowling alley lane with his fingers stuck in a bowling ball, Dean makes friends with a dwarf building a familiar looking monster, and by 'make friends with', I mean 'sniff each other's butts and lick each other's faces in a subtext-y way'. The dwarf disappears in a restroom stall, then the camera shoots down a camera shadow-filled hallway. It then dawned on me that this movie is fixated on restrooms and dislikes irritating women, but I'm not sure why, and if I did know, I shouldn't have to tell you.

Aboard Air Force One, where it's neither day nor night, Dean goes on a semi-rampage against a Southeast Asian Prime Minister and attacks the leader of the free world in a crowd of onlookers, military, and press but manages to escape and chase his girlfriend around a table. After seeming as though the movie has been playing for years and years, it ends just the way you think it would.

Werewolf Of Washington is boring, not especially horrifying, and unintentionally chuckle-inducing. It's mildly recommended if you like stuff that sucks.


Thursday, September 25, 2014

The Giant Claw


I was going to put this review of The Giant Claw in my next book, provisionally titled Stabford Deathrage Drags You Screaming To Hell, But Hell Turns Out To Be The Checkout Lane At Walgreens At 2 A.M., When All You Want To Do Is Buy A Stouffer's Macaroni And Cheese And The Joker Ahead Of You Has Like A Million Tiny Items And You Grow Old And Die There From Boredom, but that might be too long to fit on a book jacket and I've decided to put it here instead, even though the movie is awful enough to warrant getting paid for watching it.

An inexplicable giant bird attacks aircraft, trains, and French Canadians in this dreadful sci-fi film. As a voiceover narrator narrates, there's stock footage of road graters and various military operations. A pilot who's not a pilot suddenly sees a blurry bird-shaped UFO, and then aircraft seems to start to disappear, while the cast struggles to put those two events together. Then a miniature plane crash lands, and the strings supporting it are only barely visible. There's an explosion, and burning airplane wreckage is thrown by someone offscreen at the air crash survivors. Then there's stock thunder and lightning effects.

During a storm, a French Canadian man cries, and says that he saw a carcagne, which is a giant woman with the head of a wolf and bat wings that often portends death, and if he's describing the Giant Claw he's doing a piss-poor job of it. Suddenly, a poorly rendered puppet of a giant goofy bird appears, which then eats parachuters with its oddly anachronistic toothy beak in LOL-inducing extreme close-up. Someone says that it's a 'fantastic orgy of destruction', and I'm not sure they know what the words 'fantastic orgy' mean.

The bird builds a nest, and once it's stopped moving you can kind of see that it looks like a puppet of a mangled, raggedy feather duster if a puppet of a mangled, raggedy feather duster looked like Jimmy Durante and if Jimmy Durante had a lolling, gangly neck like an ostrich and a few sparse mohawk-y feathers on his head. Then someone shoots its egg with a rifle, and that just seems to make it mad, as it decides to eat the escaping French Canadian. The Giant Claw keeps making a sound that sounds like a giant caw, and it only becomes irritating after the first 15 million times it does it.

Some hot rodding hooligans say the word 'daddio', then they're eaten by the Durante Duster, and not a moment too soon. Then it awkwardly destroys parts of New York, I think. The Giant Claw seems months longer than its 75 minute runtime, but it's highly recommended if you like stuff that sucks.


Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Final Member


An aging museum curator searches for the last acquisition for his collection in this chaste, melancholy documentary. Starting as an odd collection of quirks featuring folktales, patriotism, garden gnomes, cooking, and display case warrantee worries, the film takes a somber turn after a cringe-inducing plaster of Paris mishap. Beautifully photographed, The Final Member contains lovely images of an ocean filled with jagged icebergs, black sand beaches, water-filled calderas, rolling Icelandic hillsides, and lonely, treacherous roads cutting through endless miles of white snow.

Oh, I almost forgot about the bow ties. There's a lot of those.








Age Of Tomorrow


Earth faces complicated destruction from a sort-of asteroid in this meandering Asylum film. After a meteor shower causes some unconvincing CGI fires, a firefighter's leg is broken from some flimsy drop ceiling, and then another firefighter unconvincingly jumps out a window, and you can tell he did this because the cast was looking up in extreme close-up. The prerequisite Asylum helicopter scene makes an early appearance at the 10-minute mark, but it stays grounded. Then a poorly rendered spaceship is partially seen.

After a 15-second flight into space that the unarmed cast wasn't trained for, it unconvincingly lands on the asteroid. I have to reiterate that the cast has no weapons because the cast did. After entering an asteroid cave, they realize that the asteroid is actually a spacecraft.


Metallic pods are released whose main purpose seem to be stalking part of the remaining and quickly dwindling earthbound cast, a disposable minor character's escape is unconvincingly impeded by a seat belt. Then he's vaporized. For some reason, someone offscreen throws a wastebasket. The astronaut cast teleports to a ringed Saturn-like planet which looks suspiciously like a well-manicured botanical garden, and someone says 'Our radios are crap out here' and even the cast seems incredulous that they said it. Then someone asks for a weapon and gets it, even though they didn't have any. Then someone in a well-lit fire station says 'All the power lines are down' and no one seems to notice.

Meanwhile on Earth, someone is shot through a door through their chest in a LOL-inducing fashion, and then someone in space performs a maudlin mercy killing on a disposable background character that inexplicably lasts longer than the flight into space. A giant CGI monster graphically poops out some eggs, and blinks at the audience with its six glowing eyes for some reason. After hearing the sounds of geese on the botanical garden planet, the cast battles aliens with bayonets for arms for about a month, then someone says 'We're out of missiles!' as though they just 86'd the fries until more come out of the fryer.


The movie stumbles around for another two weeks, then it ends. Age Of Tomorrow has better sets than the usual Asylum feature, but that's not saying much as many scenes still seem to take place in empty warehouses, office cubicles, and hallways shot in closeup. It seems much, much longer than ninety minutes, and ends on a somber tone, but at least it ended.





Friday, September 19, 2014

The Being


Ruth Buzzi stars in this slow-moving horror film, and even I find it implausible that I just wrote the words "Ruth Buzzi stars in a horror film". After a radio announcer says something about 'a hound and a t-bone steak' and some homodiegetic narration, an Idaho youth flees a nuclear waste dump into an ordinary trash dump where he starts a junked car, then has his head eaten off. Then someone makes a Buick do donuts on a muddy dirt road to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac. Then someone gets hit in their continuity-defying hat with a half a dozen illegal trout. Then everyone heads to the drive-in.


The kids nowadays don't know what they're missing. Instead of watching nearly any movie they want anytime on their phones in HD, they could have gone to the drive-in to see a dim projection on an outdoor screen with a bunch of people who don't know when to turn off their lights or not to honk their horns. Yeah, those were the days.

Anyway, a naked chick on the drive-in movie screen gets killed while two young naked people get killed by something gooey in their car, and green slime pours from the 8-track stereo. Don't even get me started on the wonders of 8-track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q0tBfbF55U

Then an infant finds a monster living in a hole during Ruth Buzzi's technicolor hen fruit finding contest, and Martin Landau sweeps.

After seemingly months of really boring movie and mind-numbingly wooden acting from the protagonist, The Being suddenly kicks into moderate-to-high gear with a black-and-white dream sequence featuring Martin Landau in a plane with a monster crawling on the roof, a bloody-eyed Ruth Buzzi riding a broom which is certainly worth the admission price, and a LOL-worthy moment as a monster jumps into a station wagon that the cast just treats as no big deal.

Suddenly, the monster finally appears, and it's awfully gooey, has an inflated skull for a head, and a bunch of teeth. It's actually pretty sweet, inexpertly maneuvered, and a little cheesy. Overall, The Being is recommended if you like stuff that sucks.




The Fearmaker


An opera singer returns to her castle in Mexico in this sudsy thriller that contains very few fearmakers of any variety, however, it does have a foggy cemetery, a shoving match at a paparazzi-filled funeral, baying dogs, howling winds, stock thunder and lightning, billowing curtains, many camera shadows, and lots of day-for-night scenes. Candles seem to blow out by themselves, a guy in a wheelchair plummets down a hill into a pile of rocks, and everyone in the cast lurks in the shadows at least once. A dog with a case of medically-induced double vision eats a chicken dinner, and then seems to experience some traumatic dog memories. The Fearmaker does have quite a WTF ending involving a high-speed convertible chase in the rain and a very realistic and important-to-the-plot dummy being thrown off a bridge, which then culminates in a confusing morgue full of corpses. Why there's a morgue full of corpses I'd like to know, and I'd be really disappointed if they were killed by the Fearmaker offscreen.




Tuesday, September 16, 2014

A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge


Uninteresting teens have uninteresting angst in this disappointing sequel to A Nightmare On Elm Street that doesn't have much Freddy Krueger in it. Toasters catch on fire, birds explode, vinyl records melt, teenagers wrestle with subtext, and hot dogs burst into flames, and in spite of this the film drags on and on until Freddy Krueger appears onscreen, when the film finally springs to life.


While A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 has its moments, the lack of characterization of the teens, a wafer-thin plot, and a lack of Freddy makes three-quarters of the film a tough slog.


Aerobicide


Fitness club members wearing leotards get killed with an oversized safety pin because it's the 80s in this feeble horror film. A woman is trapped in a gym's tanning bed as it catches fire, and the continuity editor can't seem to figure out if she's facing up or down. Then people do what someone thinks is exercise to vapid, derivative synth music as narrative.



After someone is murdered, a detective picks up a piece of evidence with his bare hands because forensics. Then there's frosted tips, short shorts, mullets, headbands, and an epic battle with a rake. I don't know an awful lot about aerobics, police work, yard work, or work in general, but I'm assuming someone who just got stabbed in the leg with a rake might not be able to knock someone out with a backward flying roundhouse kick, and that a perfectly healthy cop wearing cowboy boots should be able to catch him during an extended, fence-climbing chase scene, in spite of the obvious stunt double.

Aerobicide is confusing, poorly mic'd, and unpleasant, and should only be of interest to leg-warmer enthusiasts.


Monday, September 15, 2014

The Million Eyes Of Sumuru


Sexy chicks unconvincingly kill people in this tedious spy drama featuring a spy who wears a sheer polo top, looks suspiciously like a high school science teacher, and who also starred in the legendary film Robot Monster. Featuring unconvincing punches, unconvincing chases, unconvincing alarms, unconvincing heterosexuality, and Frankie Avalon in a sleazy role where he gives the spy a bouquet of cactuses, there's also wooden acting and dialogue that seems less like dialogue than partially forgotten and just remembered non-sequiturs. Sure, theres'a lot of chicks running around in bikinis, but there's also a creepy Klaus Kinski handing someone his foot and wearing a silk kimono.


BTW, I checked and double checked, and everyone in The Million Eyes Of Sumuru seemed to have the appropriate number of eyes.




Teenage


Featuring vintage film clips, old photos, interviews, and some dramatization, Teenage is a documentary about the history of the first half of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of the people who aren't exactly children, and aren't quite adults. Telling the story of the first half of the 1900s through child labor, industrialization, war, strife, and lots and lots of dancing, the spread of Americanism through music and two world wars helped create a demographic that didn't exist until Frank Sinatra invented screaming teenaged girls in the mid 1940s. Flappers, zoot suiters, jitterbuggers, hooligans, delinquents, shellshocked soldiers, and Boy Scouts are all in abundance in this exceedingly well-edited but ultimately dry documentary.

Featuring music by Bradford Cox of the band Deerhunter, I thought I heard a snippet of Neu in there as well.


Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work


A look at the life of the late stand-up comic, Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work is bittersweet and nearly laugh-free, as we see her as a tireless businesswoman surrounded by gilded opulence. Deeply insecure, insanely driven, and a surprising softy, the edgy and controversial comic lived by her calendar and never seemed to stop. Unfortunately, those looking for laughs or Red Carpet moments should look elsewhere.


Seytan (Turkish Exorcist)


From what I gather, a family struggles with a young girl's illness amidst medical quackery in this familial Turkish drama, however, the print I watched was in Turkish with no subtitles, so I'm not entirely sure. Here's my take on what went down:

A man in a large hat walks through a desert strewn with skeletons as Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells plays.



He finds a suspicious piece of pottery, and then he finds a large statue. Meanwhile, a woman hears some odd foley work in her house, then she plays a few games of tennis.

A man eats a bowl full of white beans, and that reminds me of the Turkish restaurant I used to go to which had a delicious piyaz salad on the menu, which consists of white bean, onion and cucumber. If you ever go to a Turkish restaurant, you should get that.

Someone unconvincingly plays piano, and a young girl does some unconvincing ballet. After some more foley work, the woman heads into the attic with a candle and finds half a dozen mousetraps and a book entitled Seytan, which I'm assuming is a cookbook on how to prepare meatless entrees using vital wheat gluten because she goes to the kitchen and confronts a cook as he's sharpening knives. If you're ever in Chicago, you should go the the Chicago Diner, where they serve an awesome Chik'n Fried Steak and mashed potatoes, which is meatless and I assume is made from vital wheat gluten.

During a cocktail party, the girl pees on the stairs, and that's the first sign that something is amiss. Then the mother and daughter awkwardly jump on the bed for some reason. A man gets a shoulder massage, then he runs through a meadow in slo-mo as a flute plays on the soundtrack. Suddenly, the girl has an unconvincing medical procedure performed involving enormous hypodermic needles and jets of blood squirting out of her neck, which I think is probably contraindicated in what I can only assume is food poisoning. Then she does some core-strengthening exercises in bed until her neck swells like a bullfrog, which I don't think is a very good idea immediately following an unconvincing medical procedure. Then she has cotton stuffed in her mouth and some sort of therapeutic jack hammers banging against her temples which seems like an effective treatment of something, and she gets a wide-eyed spinal tap.


Someone gives the girl a stern talking-to, and the she says "hi" to him Channing Tatum-style.


A guy in a trench coat finds the talisman on an ominous set of stairs, and the mother yells at the kitchen staff waving another spatula-like talisman. I would say that it's beginning to become difficult to discern one talisman from another, but the daughter starts stabbing herself with the spatula-talisman, so now we know which one is which, and a bookcase full of dolls moves around on its own. Then she turns her head.

Speaking of head-turning, the food poisoning takes a turn for the worse, as her face develops welts, her voice turns into a man's, she starts to wheeze, and she rarely blinks. Then she doesn't seem to like her butterscotch pudding. A guy starts to listen to some Led Zeppelin tapes backwards, and here's where I go off on a tangent about backmasking. People don't listen to important messages when they're being played forward, what makes anyone think people will pay attention to messages when they're played backward? I don't know.


Speaking of toolsheds, a strangely localized fog develops on the ominous stairs for some reason. A doctor sprinkles the daughter with water, and she doesn't seem to enjoy her pistachio pudding. Then her bad starts to move around, and I'm pretty sure that not going to help with her nausea. Then she doesn't seem to enjoy her guacamole. Somebody should really stop feeding that chick. Suddenly, this happens:


I'm not really sure what's occurring here, but if it happened at a rock concert, it would be pretty sweet. Then the movie ends. While I couldn't really understand the dialogue, I enjoyed Seytan, and it's mildly recommended if you like stuff that sucks.






Thursday, September 11, 2014

Wrestling Women Vs. Doctor Of Doom


Extravagantly coiffed female wrestlers battle hooded villains in this luchadora film. Here's what transpired: A brain surgeon uses a paint brush to draw a crude circle on the scalp of a woman he's going to perform surgery on, then he grabs a side of beef and hurls it at a disfigured, shirtless man in a cage. Someone shouts at their grandma on the phone, then someone gets kidnapped by taxi. A masked man throws some cops, then a bunch of women wearing leotards dogpile on one dude.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I'm not able to embed the classic Warner Brothers cartoon "A Hare Grows In Brooklyn" where Bugs Bunny says "Dog pile on the rabbit" because they don't want me to be happy. Instead, enjoy this clip of Witch Hazel.


After about ten more minutes of wrestling, there's a lingerie clad beat down as two men climb in a window, interrupting a slumber party as a jazzy tune plays on the soundtrack. There's a bit more wrestling, and someone gives some chicks an I-Watch.

For some reason, two guys are thrown into a room with a slowly moving wall covered in spikes. I don't know an awful lot about how to properly tenderize a human, but I have seen a lot of cooking shows on the Food Network. What I learned is that to prepare a piccata, human or otherwise, you should vigorously flatten a human between two pieces of waxed paper, and not with a caged, disfigured, shirtless wrestler.


Then there's acid, fire, explosions, more brain transplants, and table flipping.


It's not very interesting. Then there's about ten more minutes of wrestling.

In an effort to elude capture by the police after nearly choking out everyone at the wrestling match, the masked brain-transplanted female wrestler climbs a water tower, and we all know how that's going to play out.


Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Blood Glacier


I was looking forward to seeing footage of a slow moving chunk of ice slaughter people, but unfortunately, Blood Glacier has very few glaciers in it, blood-filled or otherwise. And it doesn't kill anyone, it just appears briefly at the beginning of the film, and reappears at the very end. Let's break it down, shall we?

After waking up passed out on the floor of his weather shack in his tighty-whities, a climatologist discovers a glacier full of blood, lens flare, shaky cam, and suspect dubbing. Suddenly, he sees a giant fox/beetle hybrid, and no one believes him because he's often face down in a shack in his underpants.

After the blood glacier disappears, the climatologist pees on a giant wood louse because of global warming, and an unconvincing bird-thing with a huge claw attacks. Then a woman yells at another woman for eating a banana and crying. Sometime later, someone gets their face chewed off by a suddenly not-dead giant wood louse. Then the banana yelling woman drills a mutant flying ibex in the brain, and she's the kind of chick I want on my side during a flying mutant ibex apocalypse or any sort of banana-related emergency.

Blood Glacier is pretty slow moving at the start, but really picks up steam once bugs start exploding out of people's necks and mutants get pick-axed in the brain, so I'm going to say it's recommended if you like badly-dubbed foreign horror films with a WTF ending that kind of suck.






Thursday, September 4, 2014

The Wizard Of Mars


In the future world of 1975, a group of astronauts travel to Mars and they look through telescopes indicating north, south, east and west because that's awfully handy during interplanetary space flight. Suddenly, there's lightning in space which seems about right, then the lone woman in the cast, who I'm assuming is named Dorothy, says, "The meters keep having convulsions" and I'm not sure what that means. Then their spaceship controls start to smoke.

While the ship is somersaulting through the martian atmosphere, the cast decides to get out of the relative safety of their rocketship chairs because a costume change is probably a good idea. After crash landing, they all take a nap in a rubber raft as it floats down a martian canal. Seriously though, I have to give it to these intrepid pioneers who decided to bring along inflatable rubber rafts during a space flight and when oxygen is at a premium. Speaking of oxygen, they realize they don't have any. Suddenly, a rubber crustacean attacks, and it's not very convincing or interesting. Then the cast hits the rubber crustaceans with their raft paddles even though they fail to kill them with a rifle and the monsters are literally right there, unmoving.

http://youtu.be/kTt0UO0VgFE

After some voiceover narration, the cast finds a cave.

Suddenly, after five minutes of screen-time is devoted to walking through caves, there's stock footage of magma. Now the stakes are much higher, as five more minutes of screen-time is devoted to walking through more caves, more voice over narration, more stock magma footage, and bickering.

Suddenly, someone says, "Do you supposed something happened?", and the answer is "No."

We're one third of the way through this movie.

The narrator begins talking about how the cast's watches don't work, and how time has seemingly stood still, and I believe it, as I begin contemplating throwing my watch, my phone, my computer, and all my belongings out the window in boredom. Then after stock desert sand dune footage, someone says, "Crummy desert", and I don't think they're ashamed of it at all. Then someone gets a phone call. It's a wrong number. Then someone shoots a Mars lander with a rifle because science.

Suddenly, there's a thunderstorm, and the lone woman in the cast hopes that the stock lightning effects don't strike the Mars lander.

At the halfway point of this film, the cast discovers a seen-it-coming-a-mile-away Yellow Brick Road in an obvious homage to the Wizard Of Oz, and by "homage" I really mean "mind-numbingly boring ripoff".



Then the cast arrives at a Red City because Mars.

After someone finds a pile of corpse dust in the shape of a corpse and puts their bare hands in it, they say, "It looks like they were cremated alive". Then the most cowardly lion-like cast-member finds a martian blowtorch. The cast-members debate whether or not it's an obvious plot device, and quickly abandon it. After putting their bare hands in more obvious martian corpse dust, they stumble upon a martian with an exposed glowing brain.



Then everyone stares at one another for an uncomfortably long period of time in order to stretch this 10 minute script into a full-length feature and because psychic phenomena.

Suddenly, after floating martian glowing brained ghosts drift down the lone hallway in this movie, John Carradine finally appears as a disembodied wonderful wizard head whose face is obscured by a galaxy. It's not very interesting. He narrates for about ten minutes, and I honestly stopped listening as I contemplated setting my belongings on fire out of boredom. After dropping an important sphere and using the discarded plot martian blow torch, someone gets a boost. Then everyone runs down the same martian hallway again and again as the camera's shadow is visible. Then the movie ends.

SPOILER ALERT: It was a dream, and it was a long, boring dream sorely lacking in wicked witches, flying monkeys, tornadoes, or Totos of any variety.









Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Twilight In Volterra


I've been a little busy lately. Viewing submissions for a film festival has taken up a lot of my time. I've also had to do a lot of stuff around Deathrage Towers, and that really sucked. I also watched a few movies for publication in my next book which will have 100 never-before-published reviews, provisionally titled "Stabford Deathrage Goes To Hell And Drags You Along With Him", but it's not carved in stone, and you'll have to wait for those. And work has been a drag, too. So here are a couple of reviews to keep you satisfied for the time being.



Twilight In Volterra


What starts out as a promotional travel video for the ancient Etruscan town of Volterra in Italy turns into a fawning documentary with interviews of fans of the Twilight vampire novels. Featuring lovely shots of the city's stone arches, narrow alleys, clock tower, and sinister catacombs, the documentary begins to discuss stories of 'dark presences', but drops it just as it begins to become interesting. As I'm not familiar with the book, and have only seen one entry in the Twilight saga and found it to be quite terrible, I found myself wanting to turn on a good movie about vampires.





Neither fulfilling for fans of the book or people planning a trip to the quaint Italian town, I would avoid Twilight In Volterra, as it contains no vampires at all.





The Hunt For The Abominable Snowman


Well, hate to spoil it, but they don't find him. Featuring shots of snowy Nepal and very few snowmen, abominable or otherwise, Hunt For The Abominable Snowman is another fairly decent documentary for National Geographic. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a trailer for this speculative documentary, so enjoy this instead.