MonsterHunter

Evelyn Prentice follows that time-honored tradition of having a comedy team appear in a dramatic vehicle where the most drama you get is in just how bad they are when they are trying to be deadly serious (see also Tracy and Hepburn in Keeper of the Flame). This domestic/courtroom melodrama is certainly deadly in every aspect of its execution right down to the irritating little kid that gets trotted out whenever they want to make some point about how much the dad is neglecting his family or how mommy should own up to killing the guy she started running around with just because dad was neglecting the family. William Powell and Myrna Loy, arguably the best duo of the sophisticated comedies of the nineteen thirties (Libeled Lady, Double Wedding, The Thin Man series) look entirely disinterested in every thing that transpires here as they sluggishly shamble somnambulantly through their roles as John and Evelyn Prentice, a well heeled couple that encounters problems once they start to drift apart. Read More »

The movies culled from re-editing multi-part episodes of the old Disneyland TV series are a mixed bag. Some of them like Dr. Syn, Alias The Scarecrow stand with any of Walt’s theatrical projects in terms of story, production values, and execution. Others, such as The Mystery In Dracula’s Castle suffer from weak scripts and a decidedly workmanlike effort both in front of and behind the camera. Escapade In Florence falls somewhere in between these two extremes as its hampered by a lousy script, but is made bearable by the location shooting in Florence, Italy and the winning performances of stars Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello. Read More »

Who was that masked man with the hairy lower back? That would be Don Diego de Vega, otherwise known as Zorro and I think that after seeing this movie, if Zorro was a real person, he would never reveal his secret identity more out of sheer embarrassment than out of any need to protect himself. Producer David F. Friedman has previously tormented us with his yucky sex comedies in such varied vehicles of vulgarity as The Head Mistress, The Notorious Daughter Of Fanny Hill, and Trader Hornee. In all of the films, low production values and lame humor share the stage with actors who seem almost relieved when it comes time for them to lose their clothes, roll around with one of their ugly co-stars and stop having to remember their lines. The Erotic Adventures Of Zorro, at 102 minutes, takes advantage of this format to its fullest and manages to showcase several lethargic bumping and grinding scenes to no good effect. Read More »

Henry is a regular guy dressed in suit and tie and favoring the hairstyle that either Kid or Play made famous in all those great House Party movies. If you think that the movie is calledEraserhead because of his hair though, you seriously underestimate this film. Lynch has a little more up his sleeve than run-of-the-mill nicknames here. Like dinner at Henry’s ex-girlfriend’s house that features little midget dancing chickens as the main course! Read More »

Ahmed wears a carnation on his suit whenever he’s out and about trying to kill those who would defend and fight for freedom! He goes undercover with his sinister Chinese partner (Mei Lang) at a flower shop that magically transforms into an antiques store whenever the police come to investigate! Most diabolically of all though is that he even works on cross breeding different flowers all the while he’s got the good guys locked up in his secret lair, his hideous evil culminating when he announces the creation of a brand new flower that he calls…Oriental Sunset! Yes, that noise you just heard was Lady Liberty herself queefing her star spangled panties in sheer terror! Is there no one that can stop the flower power that threatens to engulf the democracies across the globe? (And also stop Lady Liberty from grossing us out?) Read More »

We all think we know how British Intelligence works. We’ve seen the 800 or so James Bond movies where Bond gets gadgets, battles colorful larger than life villains, flirts with that dried up secretary and taps the ass of a variety of suggestively named foreign broads. Whenever the mission is so impossible that it can be done only by a dude with a license to kill who is also both a world class skier and poker player, you bring in the very best agent with a double oh designation. But what happens if the mission proves to be too hard for even James Bond to handle? Because it is so freaking lame? Enter Superseven and his license to bore! Read More »

Things begin ominously enough when the unseen narrator starts droning on about how cool ants are and how they can do all this great stuff like push aphids around and dig up dirt between the cracks of sidewalks. They also have this super sweet gimmick where they spray pheromones on people to make them do their bidding! Sensing an opportunity to turn this dopey giant bug movie into a learning experience, I hit the world wide web to find out if pheromones could really cause giant ants to take over the world. It looks like they actually use this stuff to communicate with each other about dangers, sex, and the location of the right ant hill. I also made the mistake of looking into our own use of pheromones and found out that it is thought pheromones released from the armpits may cause women living together to have “synchronous menstrual cycles.” Whoa, thanks for sharing! Let see those ants beat that! Read More »

Empire Of Ash III (or as the clumsily inserted title claimed on the VHS version I saw, Last Of The Warriors) isn’t just your standard post apocalyptic desert wasteland picture. And that’s probably because it takes place in the woods of New Idaho! If watching nameless goofs dressed in leather and driving beat up cars and battletrucks while shooting each other across rocky terrain is your thing, you needn’t worry though. There’s still plenty of rocks up in New Idaho that need blowing up! The rest of the movie similarly takes vaguely familiar elements of these sorts of movies and goes its own special direction with them. Read More »

In what has to go down as one of the great disappointments in the history of cinema, at no time during director Antonio Margheriti’s Killers Are Challenged does star Richard Harrison (Giants of Rome, Messalina Against the Son of Hercules ) ever utter the phrase “the name is Fleming. Bob Fleming.” Despite being deprived of what would have certainly provoked snickers among even the actors in the scene where that line might have been uttered, the film does not disappoint in any other area as it manages to ineptly attempt to cash in on the James Bond craze of the mid 1960s with all the success of its preternaturally dimwitted lead character. You know who I’m talking about - Fleming. Bob Fleming. Read More »

Seven Golden Men Strike Again (the sequel to Seven Golden Men) is mostly remembered for stealing Green Arrow’s boxing glove arrow gimmick and modifying it to be used with a bazooka. I suppose some of you would probably also remember it for such suspenseful spy moments as the times that the professor in charge of things constantly broadcasts his burps to his sexy assistant’s speaker-broach in an effort to prevent her from getting hot and heavy with the Latin American dictator she’s trying to seduce as part of a plot to kidnap him. There’s also the incident where the Professor plays some funky music over the ship’s radio as part of his getaway plan which causes the sailors on other ships who hear it to do some simple dance steps. Clearly, the world of mid 1960s Italian espionage cinema was one where thinking outside the box was as routine as using giant electromagnets on a submarine to hijack a large freighter loaded down with Russian gold! Read More »