There's some vampiric stuff going down at the old mill in this classic made-for-Yugoslavian-TV horror film. It's stylish, comic, and creepy. I very much enjoyed the folk costumes with their curlicued shoes. I'm not going to mention much more, but the film's ending is out of control. Honestly, you don't see something like that every day. It's a little slow-moving, quiet, and subtitled; but those things shouldn't stop you from checking it out. I watched Leptirica on Youtube. Here's a clip:
A family does stuff in this Andy Milligan disaster of a film. I would like to describe the plot in more detail, but it's impossible as I have no idea what this film is about. Someone sets someone else on fire, then someone throws several chickens. Then someone dances with a large rabbit, and someone throws more chickens. Then someone dismembers a chicken, and stabs a rodent. Then someone throws more chickens. A more fitting title would be "We've Thrown A Chicken!", but Mr. Milligan didn't ask me my opinion. Other than poultry flinging; there's "acting", terrible editing, shaky camera-work, terrible blocking, and muffled dialogue. It's also very, very boring. I watched The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! on Youtube, and I should have known better. Here's a trailer:
An unconvincing meteor gently lands on an unconvincing matte painting of the Earth, which then transforms an ordinary bulldozer into a slowly moving and unconvincingly sneaky killing machine in this made-for-TV thriller where Robert Urich doesn't get top billing. So, Robert Urich's character is killed off in like 5 minutes, and one of the other supporting characters seems unusually distraught about it for some reason and wistfully reminisces about the time they went skinny-dipping. Then the rest of the cast allows this very large, slow-moving, and extremely noisy machine to stalk and kill them because they just can't seem to out-think or out-run it.
It could happen.
Killdozer is an awful lot like Stephen King's Christine, only without the boy/car love affair and a lot more Killdozers. OK, so there's only one Killdozer, but I really like saying Killdozer.
KILLDOZER!
I watched Killdozer on Youtube, and it's recommended if you like stuff that sucks or Killdozers.
A jerky military guy attempts to desalinate a Japanese lake which annoys the monster living in its depths in this Giant Monster film that seems to be fashioned from chunks of other movies. Sadly, the chunks that have the jerky military guy in it aren't very good. There's bad editing, theremin, and a complete disregard for the scientific method. Also, the monster seems to be a guy dressed in a rubber tuatara suit. I'm sure it was expensive and difficult to acquire. I watched Varan The Unbelievable on Youtube, and it was awfully boring. Here's a trailer:
A man builds a teenaged monster in this teenaged monster film. After a convenient and fiery car crash outside his laboratory, Dr. Frankenstein brings home a cadaver and no one seems to mind. Then Dr. Frankenstein and his girlfriend go to the local make-out point for some reason. After someone says, "If you breed morons, you beget morons." and "It's my own private morgue.", Dr. Frankenstein says to his newly fabricated muscular monster, "We need to be concerned about your physique.". I'm sure all of that is just fine. Then the creature lifts weights while his head is still bandaged, which also seems fine. The creature is your typical teenager; which means he's 30 years old, pouts a lot, lives in his creator's basement, wears a tight shirt, and has a head that looks like it was crudely fashioned out of papier-mache. After some more plot has happened, Dr. Frankenstein and his future bride have a lovey-dovey moment; and by that I mean she finds out Dr. F has built a muscular teenaged murderer and then Dr. F convinces his girl to go buy her own engagement ring. While she's admiring her new bling, Dr. F feeds her to his laboratory alligator because people often have those. Then he brings Teenage Frankenstein to Make-Out Point, as if you totally didn't see that coming. I watched I Was A Teenage Frankenstein on Youtube, and it's recommended if you like stuff that sucks. Here's a trailer:
Precocious children do quirky things in this artfully directed film. All the Wes Anderson hallmarks are here: Long, impeccably-crafted, symmetrical dolly shots. Deep focus shots of fields where everyone walks in formation. Claustrophobic, dollhouse-like sets. Stagey direction. Stylized, artificial nostalgia. Hank Williams and Benjamin Britten's music as narrative. Stylized close-ups that look like Grant Wood's 'American Gothic' art directed by J. Crew and utilizing a tasteful color palette by Martha Stewart and eyewear by Warby Parker. An extravagant theater production. And let's not forget Bill Murray.
Moonrise Kingdom is a lovely and charming fable where everyone is far more interesting, eloquent, academic, creative, and intelligent than anyone has ever been ever, sort of like like they were pulled from an apparel catalog or a home-decor magazine. Unfortunately, I don't think they exist in real life. Planet Earth should be a rich, autumnal, well-photographed, and lyrical Wes Anderson adventure filled with odd and fascinating people all the time. It would be a beautiful place. I watched Moonrise Kingdom in an actual theater, and someone behind me kicked my chair the entire time causing my head to bounce around like I was riding the bumper cars. I somehow found the strength within me to let him continue living. I'm very proud of me. Here's a trailer:
Tom Hardy gives a howling, screaming, spitting, frothing, drooling, and cackling performance in this film loosely based on "England's most violent prisoner". Bronson is inventively shot, extremely violent, and features music by Scott Walker, New Order, and Pet Shop Boys. I found it to be a very funny and disturbing film. It's not at all surprising Tom Hardy has been cast as super-villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. I watched Bronson on Netflix. Here's a trailer:
One man attempts to get to the bottom of an urban mystery in this well-made documentary. Using a style reminiscent of Errol Morris, the film-makers examine the phenomenon of the Toynbee Tiles. These are mysterious messages found on busy streets pertaining to resurrecting the dead on Jupiter, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and historian Arnold Toynbee. Leaving many questions unanswered; the documentary is still very intriguing. I watched Resurrect Dead: The Mystery Of The Toynbee Tiles on Netflix. Here's a trailer:
A naive young woman wins a vacation in a contest she never entered, and somehow never questions that. Then she never seems to think that a vacation at someplace called Terror House AKA Red Wolf Inn might not be as relaxing as it sounds. And she never seems concerned that she's picked up at the airport in a station wagon with wood panelling and then becomes involved in a high speed chase through the woods being pursued by the fuzz. And she just goes with the flow when they pull up to a creepy victorian mansion and spooky harpsichord music plays on the soundtrack. And she doesn't seem to scratch her head in wonder when she meets two other girls and one of them says, "I'm a model.", nor when the phones don't work, nor when someone serves dinner and says, "I'll be back with the meat in a jif!", nor when they say they have a walk-in refrigerator, nor when the camera lingers on a close-up shot of a roasted crown rack of something with the bones decorated with frills, nor when the camera zooms in to close-up on the chipmunk-like cheeks of the dinner guests ravenously gorging on chunks of what I can only assume is medium-rare former model, nor when someone says, "Best meat you ever tasted!", nor when Pomp And Circumstance plays on the soundtrack. How dumb is she? I knew something cannibal-esque was up at 'wood panelled station wagon'. Nothing good has ever come from someone driving one of those.
Anyway, there's a visible boom, couches covered in doilies, knitting, revealing nightgowns, a seductive cake-filled dream sequence, the camera reflected in a windshield, several plot holes, jars of murky liquids, shark punching, and a giggly bare-assed paddling. It's just awful, but recommended if you like stuff that sucks. Here's a trailer:
Thank goodness for the modern convenience of the cellphone. That 1970s Ma Bell princess phone ain't going to tell you that you've got a burlap sack full of crazy calling you 47 times a day. It wasn't really that long ago when we were completely in the dark about who is calling us. It's kind of magical. Now we have these little computers that will show the phone number of the stalker stabbing our furniture with a foot-long butcher's knife when we're not home, and it will even show a picture of the perpetrator. It looks a little like this:
Yikes. Anyway, no one in this film has a cellphone; and if those poor 1970s cellphoneless suckers could contact us here in the future, they would probably want to sign up for the unlimited data plan. That way they could continue being a disc jockeying man-whore, search the Internet for a new maid service, and keep dodging poor crap-balls-crazy Lucille Bluth's calls.
I watched Play Misty For Me on Netflix. Here's a trailer, and it's pretty groovy:
Every 80s teen sex comedy cliche is trotted out and turned upside down in this awkward and satirical film. Filled with short shorts and saxophone solos, it's very funny. There's already a sizable cult surrounding this film, so I'm not going to blah-blah-blah about it. I watched Wet Hot American Summer on Netflix. Here's a trailer:
Andy Milligan directs this disaster of a film. I'm not sure how to describe it. It has something to do with the 19th century, and werewolves, and vampires, and carnivorous plants, and everyone seems to have some sort of problem with their legs. That's pretty much all I've got. There's wooden acting, amateurish makeup, unconvincing accents, stagey direction, shoddy camerawork, garish lighting, stilted dialogue, gooey leg wounds, and limping. Someone attacks a plastic plant with a knife, someone gets attacked with a meat cleaver, someone else gets attacked with a shovel, and someone chops the head off a dead mouse and eats it but it's hard to tell because the shot is so blurry. This film is unbelievably awful, and it's recommended if you like stuff that sucks. Here's a clip:
Doug McClure and Kim Novak star in this made-for-TV film about a ship adrift in the Bermuda Triangle. The pros: There's a creepy priest waving from the severed wing of a crashed airplane, a corpse dangling from the mast of the beleaguered ship, and another corpse hovering in midair below deck. Cons: Some not-very-special special effects and every musical cue from the Scooby-Doo rulebook. I found Satan's Triangle to be yawn-inducing, and I find the title to be very offensive. You can watch it on Youtube, I guess. People seem to be big fans of this movie and find it to be quite scary, but I'm not sure why. To each his own, I guess.
Paul Naschy sports a pr0n-y mustache and gets a sponge-bath in this Spanish/Italian Giallo film. A killer leaves a dragonfly at the scene of his crimes, and there are plenty of them. There's death by scythe, axe, sword, and umbrella. Someone also gives someone else a severed head in a box. There's a lengthy striptease, a torture themed carnival dark ride with chicken wire, a roller coaster shoot-out, and golf. Also, someone examines clues with a magnifying glass while in the nude, someone says, "There are too many corpses.", and a man wears false eyelashes. All in all, I didn't have a lot to complain about and the movie has a pretty cool title. I watched A Dragonfly For Each Corpse on Youtube. Here's a trailer that needs some subtitles:
From what I can tell, this jump-cut-y movie has something to do with a girl with unconvincing blonde bangs wearing complicated undergarments who has some sort of horse-drawn carriage accident, loses her memory, and gets involved in a love-triangle that needs a lot of Vaseline on the camera lens. I could be wrong, though. There are too many WTF and LOL moments to describe here, but I'm going to try. Pervy Dr. Klaus Kinski shows up; who conducts unconvincing physical exams and fiddles around with beakers filled with suspicious and murky liquids. I'm not sure why. Then people run along a path while carrying a suitcase while menacing chords are coaxed out of a piano. Then someone gets their face blown off by a shotgun. Then there's waltzing. I still don't know why. Then someone throws a pheasant, there's a near-drowning in a bathtub which sets up a largely off-camera lesbian tryst (and you can tell that happens because everyone sits around a table basking in the afterglow and eating oranges while looking longingly at one another while someone plays a saxophone), someone sports a houndstooth suit, someone wearing an evening gown who I can only asume has very little masonry experience builds a brick wall during a party after a couple of remarkably chaste sex montages, a cat hand puppet gouges someone's eye out, and someone wears a purple smoking jacket. I don't know why. The movie has quite a few corpses in it near the end, but you have to wade through some vaguely psychedelic crapola to get to them. Thankfully, there's only about 16 pages of screenplay so you don't have to worry about a plot, either. Death Smiles On A Murderer is everything that's wrong and right about the early 1970's, and probably had a lot of the people at the drive-in scratching their heads. Well, the folks who weren't high, I guess. I watched it on Youtube. Here's a slightly NSFW trailer due to a sudsy nip-slip:
A Senator has all his organs replaced after a car-crash in this sci-fi film starring Leslie Nielsen. I'm not sure why I watched this thing. I found it on a list of movies with no description, and then I saw the words 'spookshow' and 'giallo' at Youtube, and the next thing you know I'm stuck watching it. It is not a giallo, and it's not a spookshow, and it's not Airplane; although Leslie Nielsen hangs out in an airport and rides in a jet. At least I think he does. That's not important right now. So there's lots a wood panelling, and melodramatic surgical brow-mopping, and lots of talking on phones. There's also unconvincing blocking, unconvincing Alamagordo rush-hour traffic, an unconvincing cab ride, an unconvincing awakening from a coma, Leslie Nielsen unconvincingly running in an alley or in the desert or anywhere, and an unconvincing viewing of a duodenum. Thankfully, Angie Dickinson is in it occasionally. It's still pretty boring, though. I watched The Resurrection Of Zachary Walker on Youtube, and there doesn't seem to be a trailer.
Shameless self-promoting rock acts The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols fight, drink gallons of booze, take copious amounts of drugs, and melt-down in this warts-and-all documentary. Featuring grainy self-aggrandizing interviews and often-interrupted-by-drug-and-alcohol-induced violent concert clips; someone says, "We're going to start a revolution, and we'll show you how.", and someone says, "Someone broke my sitar.". That someone is Anton Newcombe, and he's fascinating. Buy his records. I watched Dig! on DVD. Here's a trailer:
And here's a clip where The Brian Jonestown Massacre actually make it through a song without kicking someone in the face, smashing their gear, or mentioning The Dandy Warhols:
A television reporter and cameraman are locked inside an apartment building in this terrifying shaky-cam horror film. Shot in that JJ Abrams/found footage/reality style; the tension builds throughout from the deliberately obscured action, the effective lighting, and the false startles. There are deep focus shots down darkened hallways, shots through barely cracked windows, and lots of screaming and running and bleeding and biting. A completely effective effort, and I jumped several times. I watched [rec] on Crackle in a dubbed version and I would rather have seen it in the original Spanish with subtitles, but beggars can't be choosers. Here's a trailer, but the less you know about it the better:
Killing Bono is the true story of two friends who started bands in high school. One guy's band went nowhere. The other guy's band was U2. Killing Bono was well-shot and well-acted, and honestly, I just picked it because the title was intriguing. During the film I kept wondering to myself if Bono was actually going to die in the movie, but then I realized he doesn't because he's still alive making music and saving the rainforest and getting Nobel Peace Prizes or whatever it is that rock stars do. I don't wish Bono any particular harm; but he can be a bit much with the sunglasses and the rock-star posturing and the earnestness and whatnot, so I'm not ashamed to say I crossed my fingers for a moment and half-hoped he might get crushed by a falling safe or something. Does that make me a bad person? Don't answer that because I already know the answer. It's a moot point anyway. Spoiler alert: Bono survives. Regardless, I enjoyed the rivalry between the two bands, even though it was always one-sided. Side-note: Every time I wrote Bono in this review I misspelled his name as Bobo. I'm not sure why. Yes, I do. It's because I'm a bad person. I watched Killing Bono on Netflix. Here's a trailer:
I'm really behind in everything. I've let everything go. I haven't watched many movies, and I haven't blogged much, either. I've been trying to get stuff done around the house since I'm a big DIY sort of guy; which means I follow the directions on the packages of the stuff I buy from the chain warehouse fixer-upper store, cut my hands, mash my thumbs, put it together wrong, and have the results not function properly and look like crap. And due to circumstances beyond my control I haven't been able to watch bad movies; and by 'circumstances beyond my control' I mean Mrs. Deathrage would't let me watch them the past few days because she 'wants to watch something good for a change'.
Well, I showed her because we watched something kind of lousy. Stupidity is a documentary about the little researched area of humans doing dumb stuff. It's done in that rapid-fire editing style where a whole bunch of brief snippets of people doing dumb stuff are thrown at the screen while a narrator talks about how everything's going to Hell in a handbasket. I was not impressed, and I think I've seen it before. I could put forth a little effort and do the research to see if I actually have seen it before, but meh. I don't wanna, and I don't care that much. I'm just going to sit here and apply more antiseptic ointment to my various home improvement injuries. I really should hire someone to do my home improvement for me. I watched Stupidity on Snagfilms. Here's a trailer, but it looks like crap and it's slightly NSFW due to language and brief pixilated nudity:
A helicopter is attacked by a pterodactyl and it crash-lands amongst stock footage of Antarctica in this Jock Mahoney film that doesn't have anything to do with Tarzan. There's a carnivorous tentacle plant, rear-projection Komodo dragons, and a guy dressed up in an awkward rubber T-Rex suit. I watched it on youtube. Here's a trailer:
A voiceover narrator attempts to say Overlords Of The UFO as many times as possible in this implausible documentary. Overlords Of The UFO has all the required elements of a shoddily assembled 1970s pseudo-scientific documentary about UFO Overlords: blurry still photos, suspect eyewitness interviews, National Enquirer headlines, and Uri Geller. If I were you, I would skip ahead to the footage of a UFO that seems to be various kitchen implements glued together and held aloft by fishing line. It's almost totally worth sitting through the rambling nonsensical script about The Overlords Of The UFO. But not quite.
Wait a minute! You don't have to sit through the whole movie, because that clip is right here!
Yikes. I watched Overlords Of The UFO on youtube and it was pretty lousy.
Some scientists go to the jungle in search of rocks, I think, in this sci-fi film. I'm not sure why. Then the cast wears panama hats, sarongs, neckerchiefs and pith helmets. For some reason, a badly realized blue smear in the river causes someone to drown and then there's a glowing mouse. There's an incessant chirping noise throughout the film, and I think it's supposed to be a jungle bird, but I'm not sure. Then someone paints a portrait of someone standing on a raft at the base of a waterfall. I'm not sure why. For the briefest of moments we actually get to see what I assume is an Omegan running through the jungle foliage, but I could be wrong. I don't think it really matters. The Omegans reminds me of The Portrait Of Dorian Grey meets Aguirre, The Wrath of God; which is a really terrible idea if you think about it. I watched The Omegans on youtube. Here's a clip:
Several boors shoot a movie in a house where there were approximately seven corpses in this not-very-horrifying horror film. People nitpick one another, bitch about stuff, and wear lavender turtlenecks. I'm not sure why. Thankfully, there is a shambling rotting corpse near the end of the movie, and that's not too bad; but you have to suffer through a lot of sudsy crapola to get to it. I have never understood why people in horror movies go to the house/crypt/island/dungeon/torture chamber where the unspeakable terror/murder/killing spree/bigfoot attack/alien abduction occurred and then are surprised when something awful happens. Oh yes I do, it's because it's fun and I do it as often as I can. I watched The Hosue Of Seven Corpses on youtube. Here's a clip, but it's from the end of the movie. If you don't want this spoiled movie spoiled, I wouldn't watch.
