MonsterHunter

A blind girl gets a new set of peepers which allow her to see for the first time since she was a tot, but there’s a catch. Not only is she able to see the world around her for the first time in years, she also has acquired this brand new super power where she can see dead people! She can also sort of see the future. And the past. Well, someone else’s past anyway. Then there’s mysterious shadowy guy she sees that accompanies some of the dead people she sees. I felt like I could have used a brain transplant before understanding completely what was going on in this eye transplant movie. Read More »

From the absurdly spectacular slow motion shoot out on the docks that opens the film all the way until star Charles Napier (Hornsby) banters with his local partner Rodriguez and their sexy sidekick about Rodriguez marrying her despite him having heard Hornsby screw her while she was wearing a wire earlier in the movie, Umberto Lenzi’s Mean Tricks is an appallingly proficient bad ass cop movie that not only delivers every cliche you freaking demand from such films (Rodriguez’s gruff captain is nicknamed Iron Balls!), but in the best Italian movie tradition invents its own along the way! Read More »

Only in the world of Italian exploitation cinema would it be possible for a guy to write two movies in a year, both featuring main characters named Trash wandering around in a world gone mad, but manage to rip off two completely different mainstream movies! And there could only be one screenwriter in all of Italy able to simultaneously rip himself off, but yet be completely original by having one film feature a male Trash and one feature a female Trash! And only this man, Dardano Sacchetti, could also write three other movies in the same year! Read More »

When was it during The Expert that I realized I was watching the “Most Underrated Jeff Speakman Movie I Only Vaguely Remember Hearing About When It Came Out?” Was it when Speakman took his date to the museum with the giant statute of a woman who represented justice or liberty or whatever and proclaimed that he came for the solitude? Or was it when the warden of a prison proudly announced to the gathered media that he had catered that night’s execution? Surely, it had to be that time when Speakman was run over by a car in an alley behind a bar and then proceeded to beat the holy hell out of the four guys inside of it - all while rocking a kick ass jean jacket! Read More »

Director Ferdinando Baldi (Duel of the Champions, Warbus) and writer/star Tony Anthony began the 3D revival in the 1980s with the spaghetti western Comin’ At Ya! and they also bring the Italian chapter of it to a close with Treasure Of The Four Crowns. As near as I can tell, those were the only two Italian 3D movies made, which means that they have to be that much more spectacular since all our Italian 3D needs will have to be satisfied by those two films for years to come! Well, you can rest easy, amigo because Treasure Of The Four Crowns has enough 3D action to fill a movie called Treasure Of The Five Crowns! Read More »

Fifth films in movie series have a spotty track record. For every crappy movie like Star Trek V, there’s a movie like Hellraiser: Inferno that I can’t even remember if I’ve even seen it! Then you’ve got films like Rocky V that don’t do anything to advance the series (or Tommy Morrison’s career) while the fifth Godzilla effort (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster) saw Godzilla get a personality transplant. Coming only one year after the fifth James Bond movie, was it possible that the Kommissar X movies could somehow rise above all the other five time losers out there? Is it possible to rehash everything that probably barely worked three or four times before, but change a few actors, the mission, and location just enough so we realize that we are actually watching a different movie than the first four Kommissar X movies and leave us thirsting for a sixth and seventh entry? Tough questions, but with an easy answer: Brad Harris climbs into a giant tire and rolls around during a massive gun fight at a quarry! Read More »

This is a great movie. If you’re Thomas Ian Griffith. Excessive Force is Griffith’s masturbatory fantasy where he’s a tough cop who plays by his own rules. As the writer and star, Griffith manages to leave no stone unturned in search of every 12 year old boy’s idea of how these rogue cop movies are supposed to go. Which I would be totally in favor of if Griffith wasn’t such a tool. Read More »

If you enjoyed the delightfully incompetent Super Seven Calling Cairo and wondered where director Umberto Lenzi honed his talents in making uninspired James Bond knock offs that take place in Cairo, 008 Operation Exterminate provides the pleasingly appalling answer. It’s all here - the pointless trip to the pyramids, the tacked on trip to a colder country (this time it’s Germany instead of Switzerland), the gadgets that surely only seemed awesome to Umberto, and of course the obligatory, but quite embarrassing reference to Ian Fleming’s James Bond himself! (I’m not watching a spy movie just to see secret agent Frank Smith lounging at the hotel pool with his copy of Live and Let Die! Hell, I could do that myself and I don’t even have a license to kill!) Read More »

Sometimes at work Aki sees a little boy in the movie theatre. His name is Hideki. You may recall Hideki as the name of the little freak from Evil Dead Trap that sort of lived inside his homicidal brother and ran around killing people (or was that his homicidal brother and Hideki was along for the ride?). As confusing and stupid as the Hideki character was in Evil Dead Trap, they manage to take things to a whole new level in this one. Read More »

Nami is the host a late night talk show and one of the segments they do is to feature home videos that their fans send in. It shouldn’t come as any big surprise that the kind of people who would stay up real late to watch an ugly Japanese woman do a talk show, might be a chopstick shy of a pair, if you catch my meaning. One of the viewer submitted tapes shows someone going through the city and ending up at an abandoned factory where a woman is tortured and killed. To establish that this is one of those “over the top” movies we get a nice long, loving shot of a knife going into her eyeball. Nami is horrified and does what any of us would do. She gets four members of her crew together and they follow the landmarks that were on the video tape and go to the abandoned factory. Read More »