MonsterHunter

Dean Jones, who appeared in every single movie the Walt Disney Company made from 1965-1975, stars as a scientist who is trying to teach animals stuff. For reasons never adequately explained, he is fixated on trying to teach an obviously dull-witted duck how to do something. His boss ridicules him for this, but once you get a gander at Dean’s home life, you begin to understand why he feels a duty to try and help the brain damaged of the animal kingdom. Read More »

I was too grossed out by these chicks to actually count them, but I’m pretty sure that at no time in this movie from Ted V. Mikels (we’re still trying to forget him from the killer cat food movie, The Corpse Grinders and that other ugly chick movie, The Doll Squad) was there ever a gang of girls that amounted to ten. This girl gang of disaffected miners seemed to hover at about six or seven, but with all the murky night shots that took place early in the film, Teddy might have snuck in a few extras without me noticing. Read More »

What is it about people, especially those with families and little kids, that once they figure out their brand new mansion that their rich uncle left them is actually haunted by malevolent ghosts, that they don’t move out as soon as the first meat cleaver goes whizzing past their heads? Is it because they couldn’t get a U-Haul rented on such short notice or what? That’s really always been the problem with these haunted house movies -explaining why the people just hang around and suffer the slings and arrows of their otherworldly roomies. Read More »

Depending on who you talk to, this is either an overblown, self-important, boring piece of hippie junk or a landmark, thought-provoking work of art that contemplates where man has been and what his ultimate destiny is. I guess it all comes down to what you want this film to be. There are those that can’t (or don’t) want to get past the trappings of its sci-fi origins with its spaceships and apes and psycho computer. Of course if you paid any attention to the movie at all, you would realize that that’s all those things were - mere trappings. Read More »

I have a lot of fantasies about how the world will end. It kind of goes with the territory of feeling disenfranchised with life and having no control over anything except occasionally your bowels. Usually these fantasies are some variation of me waking up on a warm sunny day to find that everyone I hate has been killed in an SUV rollover or been bludgeoned to death in their trailer by a guy who resembles me (hey - how did that guy also get my ball bat?) while all the people that I like are dropping by my house sucking up and telling me what a swell Joe I am and how would I like to go to Six Flags with them? Read More »

A rather dull piece of cheese, the cinematic equivalent of a bland chunk of mass-market Colby, 2103: The Deadly Wake did manage to accomplish one remarkable feat that should provide food for thought for all true movie buffs. It wasn’t the fact that despite being set in the future on a futuristic ship where a fetus in a tube full of green liquid operated all sorts important ship functions that the captain still had to use a steering wheel to make left turns and such. If it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t have the scene in all great future boat movies where the crazy captain has to use a rope to tie the steering wheel in place while he went and did something crazy somewhere else. That’s precisely the sort of thing we want in our movies about ugly brown ships floating around aimlessly while shot through a headache-inducing ochre filter for no reason. Read More »

I’ll confess to being a bit skeptical about a zombie movie taking place in England, my main concern being that I was going to have a difficult time sorting out the humans with bad teeth from the zombies with bad teeth. How would they even tell themselves apart? No one over in Europe takes bathes or even shaves their pits! Or is that just France I’m thinking of? I suppose all the smelly French people figured out who was who is such wine-spewing epics like The Grapes Of Death and Zombie Lake, so maybe the British would be able to muddle through after all. Read More »

This is the movie about nine guys who break out of prison that manages to be both funny and sad that we’ve all been waiting for! It’s a bit of a dirty trick since you get lulled into the rollicking road trip aspect of the film following their exploits as they search for some buried treasure that the tenth guy in their cell (he didn’t get to go on their field trip for some reason) has clued them in on only to have the carpet pulled out from under us ever so slowly and deliberately as the movie’s second half unfolds. Read More »

Anytime the slightly feminine guy you rent your isolated villa from says that he is going off to Kuwait to work on his rich daddy’s oil rig and then chicks start getting killed off at your house, you should probably just forget about getting your security deposit back and just boogie on down to the Holiday Inn Express. I’m always impressed with the courage the main character demonstrates by staying in the house, even after mysterious women start disappearing, counter tops develop gouges from butcher knives and blood droplets start appearing everywhere. Read More »

The only question I have is where in the hell was Pig Pen? That stinky little fellow is the only reason anyone watches these adventures of an ugly, bald whiner and his weirdo friends. You would think that Charlie Brown would have the decency to invite his dirty buddy to Thanksgiving dinner, but alas, I guess this holiday is for clean people only. If I were Pig Pen, I’d be glad that I was having my own Thanksgiving dinner down at the shelter or wherever it is that filthy freak lives, because Chuck is usually busy celebrating his big pity party regardless of what holiday the calendar says it actually is. Read More »

Generally speaking, a movie containing not one, but two scenes of urination would not receive a good review from this viewer. Some things are best left to the imagination. This film though somehow manages to make it work. Read More »

By the time narrator Robert Redford solemnly intoned the final line of this film, “I am haunted by waters,” I could do no more than to sit for some several minutes and attempt to catch my breath. My two hour journey through the lives, loves, and fishing trips of the Maclean family had left me drained, my very soul touched and changed at least six times during this movie. I learned so much not only about the meaning of living a full life, but about what it is to be a man. And a son. And a brother. And a father. And the value of a really good hair conditioner. Read More »

I’m not one of those 2-D snobs when it comes to my animation. I realize that there is a contingent of folks out there that bemoan the disappearance of the traditionally drawn “flat” animation and bitterly complain about how cartoons have lost something with the advent of computer generated images. Like anything else though, the old style animation was just as capable as producing crap as any art form. If you don’t believe me, then you never sat through Saturday morning cartoons during the 1980s (simple backgrounds and stiff characters ring a bell?). Read More »

The least believable thing in this movie is that Scotland Yard would ever hire Abbott and Costello to be bobbies in some kind of pilot program testing out how well Americans do in British law enforcement. I’m not sure what the point of this program was or even how Bud and Lou got selected for this gig, but this dopey project is just the excuse we need to get our boys overseas so that they can mix it up with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This time around Bud and Lou go by the names of Slim and Tubby (I’ll leave it to you to puzzle out who’s who) and they do about as well policing the mean streets of London as you expect them to. Just what sort of heinous crimes are they trying to halt while on duty? Read More »

Having ridden the success of their monster films for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years, by 1948 Universal had gone through about all the permutations of monsters battling one another they could think of. In an effort to suck even more money out of these played out ideas, they decided to insert their monsters into a comedy starring Bud and Lou. The first of what turned out to be an ongoing series of these horrorific comedies is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and it is by far and away the best of the series and probably about the funniest horror spoof out there. Read More »

I’m sure all of you remember the very first Invisible Man sequel, The Invisible Man Returns . That movie starred the voice of Vincent Price and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. Price portrayed a slightly prissy owner of a mine who is wrongly accused of murdering his brother. Price has a doctor at the mine shoot himself up with some invisible juice so that he can be free to roam around looking for the “real killers.” While he does this, he also has to hurry up and get it done before the drug makes him crazy. As you might expect, he succeeds in finding the real killers and gets a blood transfusion that turns him back visible. Read More »

By 1955 Abbott and Costello had met just about every monster Universal had to offer. The only one that had escaped their withering satire was the Mummy. Of course by the end of the Kharis films in 1944, many probably already believed that the Mummy was a joke. No matter though as Universal cranked out one last gasp in the Abbott and Costello meet the Monster of the Week oeuvre. This one looked chintzy and the gags were more rickety than ever, though the film was not without its amusing moments (almost exclusively provided by Costello). Read More »

The movie starts out with Tetsuro getting a message to once again board the Galaxy Express 999. (I’m taking a wild guess that he rode the rails in the original Galaxy Express 999.) Earth has become a warzone with invading something or others causing trouble for our high-pitched hero. Aided by a group of aging rebels who sacrifice themselves so that he can catch his train, Tetsuro boards the 999. The destination? Space adventure! Read More »

Supposedly director Lucio Fulci lifted the concept of the movie Carrie for this tale of an ugly chick who is tricked by her peers, accidentally run over, goes into a coma, develops strange mental powers (despite being brain dead), and uses a new student to get her sweet revenge. I’m not going to rap Fulci for emulating Carrie though, mainly because I’ve never seen Carrie. Read More »

“Let me tell you something. You read my fucking lips. I will never sign anything or admit to anything…that would slander my name, my God, or my country. You understand me? I loathe you. I despise everything you stand for. You’re a low life pathetic, drug-dealing, greedy, Petrovian piece of dog shit. That’s what I think of you. So if you have anything to say to me, say it right to my nuts.” Read More »

This is basically just a limp rehash of the Jon Hall/Maria Montez Arabian Nights movie that Universal released the year before. That one apparently made them a bunch of money so they figured they could film it again with the same two stars and make even more money. And it really is the same film. Jon Hall plays the rightful ruler of Baghdad in both who is trying to regain the throne from some pretender, Maria Montez is the acting-challenged red head posing as an exotic beauty who really loves Hall’s character but is being forced to marry the usurper in both, and at some point in each movie the lovebirds have some mistaken identity problems which allows the director to drag out the story before the mistake is discovered. Read More »

This is the alien invasion movie that bowlers have been waiting for! The original Alien was a pretty good little film. It had atmosphere, cool monster, gooey special effects, and even a cyborg! But it left a lot of us keglers feeling like it was that spare we had to settle for after failing to pick up the strike in the tenth frame. Sure, you had an alien on the rampage in deep space and all, but where in the heck was all the bowling? How much more dramatic would it have been if the alien was trying to eat Ripley while she was in the middle of trying to bowl 300? Crud! I just soiled myself thinking about the tension! Read More »

The liner notes say that film scholars have re-evaluated this movie and whereas they originally dismissed it as simply a generic (albeit good looking) tearjerker of a movie, it has now been declared as being really important for some reason. I can’t recall why we’ve gone ahead and moved this one from the “crap” pile to the “art” pile, but I am here to say that another re-evaluation of this film is in order and that upon further review, the new conventional wisdom is hereby ditched in favor of the old conventional wisdom with a some modifications. Read More »

By the time American Rickshaw came out in 1990, the salad days of the Italian trash movie were just about finished. To be sure there were some excellent examples of the form still coming out at this time including Lucio Fulci’s Demonia, Umberto Lenzi’s Black Demons, and Bruno Mattei’s Shocking Dark, but you didn’t see the sheer quantity from the Italians like you used to. Read More »

There’s a lot of stuff in Angel Town (directed by Eric Karson of Black Eagle fame) that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Olivier Gruner’s presence at Southern California University is good for about two scenes and nothing else. There’s some talk about Gruner training the Olympic team or something. There’s the flashbacks he has to his youth in France where he was treated poorly. And best of all, there’s the scene at the beginning of the movie when Gruner was still in France and a woman screws him in a cemetery! And he still decided to go to America! Read More »

Legend has it that some evil genie was pissed because of the way this Universal movie portrayed the whole milieu of ancient Arabia (not enough emphasis on evil genies probably) and as a result he smote all those involved with the film. Star Jon Hall committed suicide after a battle with cancer, Maria Montez drowned in her own bathtub, and Sabu croaked before he was forty. I’m not really a big believer in this story (mainly because I made it up), but I always like to dampen your enjoyment of escapist fare such as this by dropping on you the fact that in spite of everyone’s broad smiles, derring-do, and happy endings, all these people were destined to terrible fates (well except Ms. Montez - after all, she could have lived to act some more). Read More »

Proving once again that old saw that anything Hollywood can do successfully, the Italians can do cheaper and with Antonio Margheriti, Ark Of The Sun God starring David Warbeck is Rome’s low-budget rip of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. However, what AOTSG lacks in originality and funding, it makes up with in Trans-Am chases. That’s only one of several personal stamps that Antonio (showing up here in the credits in his American secret identity of Anthony M. Dawson) leaves on this movie like the bootprint of a Bruno Maglia knock-off. Read More »

Director Frank Capra, known for his movies about the great American underdog, war propaganda films, and for that one where Jimmy Stewart saves Christmas, explores the glorious American family in Arsenic And Old Lace and shows us that the violent, murderous society we pride ourselves on now, isn’t merely some recent invention of the absent parent, video game industry, and liberal media bias. Read More »

Hindsight being what it is, I don’t imagine that I should have ever thought that a movie starring a guy named Rik Von Nutter and Gaby Farinon would be anything above “worst movie about a runaway space station ever” status. If Rik and Gaby never had the good sense to change their names to something that didn’t immediately make me think that this was some type of send up of movies about runaway space stations, then why would I think they had any ability to judge scripts? Read More »

I always wondered why they never made any movies based on those John Carter, Warlord of Mars books that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote back in the middle ages, but after seeing an ancient Doug McClure and even more ancient (who’d have thought it possible?) Peter Cushing mucking around in the center of the Earth at some Burroughs’ created land called Pellucidar, I breathed a pretty big sigh of relief that John Carter and his planet-saving exploits were still relegated to my meager imagination. Read More »

This is an on again, but mostly off again satire about how dumb war is. I assume it’s some type of satire for two reasons. One is that there are some scenes in this movie that look like they were intended to be silly as opposed to just being chalked up to the usual incompetence you see in way cheap imports like this. The other reason is because the back of the DVD box tells me so. It also tells me that this movie was made in Yugoslavia which didn’t contribute all that much to things other than to confirm my suspicion that these Eastern Europeans were just as capable of bad movie making as their German, English, Italian, Spanish and Floridian (see the collected works of H.G. Lewis) brethren. Read More »

At long last, Steven Seagal fans who like guys getting stabbed have a movie to call their own! Attack Force features our Rotund Rambo plunging blades into hopped-up Eurotrash like he actually cared if he saved Paris from having the diabolical drug CTX dumped in its water supply! Of course, he really doesn’t care all that much; saving Paris is just an unfortunate by-product of getting revenge for the murders of his strike team at the beginning of the film. In fact, since Steve was actually shooting this movie in Romania and nowhere near Paris, he might not have even been aware that Attack Force took place in Paris. Same with his stunt doubles and the guy dubbing his voice about one-third of the time. Read More »

You ever have one of those days where you wish you could go back to bed and start it all over again like Bill Murray in that irritating Groundhog Day movie? I’m pretty sure that’s how Dave Walker felt in this movie about guys in black tarps harassing backwoods types. Dave is the lard ass that runs the general store that serves the tri-swamp area with all its food, bait, and gossiping needs. Read More »

This is a sturdy entry in that genre of horror film where stuff is either way too big or way too small. In this case, you’ve got a bunch of people shrunk down by a mad doll maker instead of giant puppets running around killing people (like the title tricked me into believing I’d be seeing). Read More »

This movie, according to the liner notes (how do you get a job writing liner notes for forgettable 70s British sexploitation pictures anyway?) was trying to capitalize on a fad that was sweeping across Britain at the time. Supposedly it was the “in” thing to do to have yourself an au pair girl. I guess some genius came up with the idea that since British women were so fugly, they would import chicks from better looking countries (Denmark, Sweden, the South Pacific) to come and do light household chores around the home. Light household chores like the husband. I’m not sure what the British woman thought of this whacky new fad, but if it meant that she didn’t have some beak-nosed guy with crooked teeth and werewolf sideburns trying to paw her every night after a hearty meal of fish and chips, then I’ll bet there wasn’t a lot of noisy complaints around the flat. Read More »

Shigeharu Aoyama is a producer whose wife goes and dies on him. He loves her a lot and they had a son together and now it’s up to those two men to move on without her. Fast forward seven years. The son hasn’t had too much of a problem moving on, what with being a teen-age stud and picking up chicks on the subway to bring home and eat his daddy’s dinner. Aoyama though, has not remarried and doesn’t have a girlfriend. His son tells him that he’s looking old (having a dead wife and teen-age stud will do that to a man) and so Pops decides that maybe seven years is long enough for grieving (and celibacy). Read More »

It’s Terminator meets Die Hard meets Frankenstein meets an Olivier Gruner movie! And that means exactly two things: lots of scenes of guys crawling in air shafts, elevator shafts and sliding down trash chutes and that I’m turning on the closed captioning so that I have a fighting chance to understand just what in the hell Olivier is muttering about this time! Don’t worry though if you’re like most of Olivier’s fans and can’t read because Olivier does most of his muttering in this one with futuristic guns and futuristic android kung fu! Read More »

The United States of America is the greatest country the world has ever seen. Freed from the tyranny of an oppressive colonial power centuries ago, the Home of the Brave represents a beacon of hope to those who come to its shores in search of the sweet minty fresh breath of freedom! But there are those deep in the bowels of its leadership that would pervert all we hold dear! Powerful men who would stop at nothing to achieve their own deranged agenda! Men who operate under the soul-shriveling name of…the Pentangle! Read More »

The beauty of this job (and trust me - after a teeth-grinder like this one, it is most assuredly a job) is that you’ll find yourself in some of the most bizarre of situations. Thus it is that I am forced to complain about something that I would have never thought myself capable of just a few short months ago: where the hell was Umberto Lenzi in this mess? Read More »

Two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn barely registers here in this movie about the dude everyone picked over Jesus to be set free when it was time for the weekly crucifixions. Quinn has very little dialogue, very few scenes of dramatic impact and spends most of his time on the road to accepting the Christian faith, grunting and mumbling like he just woke up or something. Read More »

Jane Fonda plays sexy “astronavigatrex” Barbarella in this sci-fi sex romp. This is one of those movies where it sounds better than it’s actually executed. The story (such as it is) involves Barbarella going to the planet Lythonian to bring back Earth scientist Duran Duran (that name seems familiar) from the Black Queen. She needs to do this because Duran invented something called the positronic ray which erases people and puts them into the fourth dimension never to be seen again. Read More »

Baron Blood tells the tale of an American guy with 70s wardrobe, hair, and sideburns going to Austria while taking some time off after finally getting his master’s degree. It seems that his ancestors are from there and he wanted to check out some of the family in the old country. He meets up with an uncle, a professor of something, played by Joseph Cotton. Apparently they couldn’t get Vincent Price, so they had to “settle” for Joseph Cotton. Cotton was just some guy who was also in Citizen Kane , The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil , among other pictures. Vincent Price starred in The Fly. Read More »

Things take place in one of those ridiculous futures that only exist to set up the preposterous premise of the movie. In this case, it’s the silliest one since Logan’s Run. Instead of everyone dying when they hit thirty (shoot, you’re already dead inside by then anyway), there’s this law known as the Battle Royale Act. I wasn’t terribly sure of all the provisions, but along with mandatory uniforms and probably school prayer and posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms next to the pamphlets on chlamydia and other STDs, the bill also sets up the hot new game show, Battle Royale! Read More »

Did I hate this movie? Not really. Did I love it? Can’t say that I did. Well, did I at least have the slightest idea what was going on in it? Of course I didn’t! Oh, I understood that the first Battle Royale was a big hit and that a sequel was mandatory, but while they attempted to replicate a portion of the first movie, they also tried to expand things and waded into all sorts political muckety-muck that if I understood what point they were trying to make, I would probably be horribly offended as a real American. Luckily, as a real American, I can appreciate a person’s right to express their idiotic views so long as they’re wrapped up in lots of explosions, violent deaths, and gun battles. I’m much more interested in having a movie kick me in the ass than I am in being an ideologue. Read More »

Easily much better than the previous “greatest movie about baseball in Japan,” 1992’s Mr. Baseball starring Tom Selleck, Battlefield Baseball succeeds because of the relative dearth of baseball-related antics (as well as the dearth of Tom Selleck) and instead uses the trappings of baseball merely as a way to get across its message that everyone wants to feel loved - even a high school baseball team of homicidal mutants. Read More »

I’ll admit it - I went and took a dump while Frankie Avalon was singing “These Are The Good Times” at the Pavilion run by old Big Drop (Don Rickles), but I can’t blame my sudden need to evacuate three days worth of cereal and tuna solely on Frankie. I suspect that just as much of the credit can been given to the several prior musical numbers in this movie, some more stool-loosening than others. (The songs performed by biker gang member Eric Von Zipper come immediately to mind.) Read More »

Tatsuya is just your regular Japanese guy. His father broke into his mother’s house and raped her while forcing her husband to watch. Then growing up with his mother who is still married to the same guy, he would peek through the keyhole and watch his step father bump uglies with his mistress while Tatsuya’s mother was forced to watch. It’s pretty much The Waltons but seen through the lens of Japanese popular culture. Read More »

Giant grasshoppers invade Chicago. There you go. Perhaps the lone scenario that’s more apocalyptic for that city is what would happen to it if the Chicago Cubs ever won the World Series. Something tells me that if that happened, hundreds of mutant locusts jumping all over Lake Shore Drive would be seen as no more irritating than a 7-9 season for the Bears. Read More »

The Gilbreths, whose sole claim to fame is that they have never heard of birth control, stage an unwelcome return in this, the sequel to the insipid Cheaper By The Dozen and the results are more of the same: meandering stories that don’t hold your interest, moments designed to evoke laughs that succeed only in provoking yawns, and the complete downplaying of all but about two or three of the daughters. Read More »

If you’ve ever read the real estate section of your local paper, you’ve seen the ads: Great starter home! 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, attached garage, coven of zombie witches, excellent schools, $229,000. Built on the scene of a horrific witch burning centuries ago, this history-infused charmer has been retrofitted with central air and is wired for cable. Though thoroughly modern in its amenities, the gateway to hell located on the second floor still functions! Perfect for families with small children who are not too attached to old-world notions of souls! Read More »

According to the Internet Movie Database, in less than thirty years, Joe D’Amato managed to get credit for directing some 198 movies. Beyond The Darkness is probably his most famous one. If you’ve never heard of D’Amato or this movie, you may be more familiar with Jurassic Pork, Robin Hood: Thief of Wives, or The Erotic Adventures of Aladdin X. He also lent his directing talents in some capacity to Zombie 5: Killing Birds and Contamination .7 if your tastes run towards something other than obscure Italian adult knock-offs of major Hollywood films. He’s probably the only director who could make a movie called Endgame and you wouldn’t be able to guess if it was a porno or a post-apocalyptic adventure without actually watching it. Read More »

Okay, I’ll admit it - I like Christmas movies. Or I guess I should say that I like the idea of Christmas movies. It seems like that a lot of times when I watch a movie that features Christmas prominently, it never fails to disappoint, substituting cheap platitudes and artificial sentiment for an interesting story or genuine feeling. Read More »

From self-important start to self-important finish, this movie runs on all cylinders, managing to tackle every single social ill of the early 70s that people pretended to care about. Vietnam, women’s rights, Indian rights, environmentalism, alternative education, bigotry, and half-breed green berets that try to reconnect with their Indian heritage, while practicing a unique mix of pacifism and whoop-ass. Read More »

If you’ve seen George Romero’s zombie movies too many times, are tired of the wan imitations from Italy, and befuddled by the recent Japanese wave of undead films that stress low budget style over storytelling, then it may be time for you to look into a cheap Chinese import. Bio Zombie is a movie out of Hong Kong that puts a frenetic, comedic spin on the zombie genre and is surprisingly entertaining once the zombies finally start rampaging in the second half of the movie. Read More »

Black Angel is based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich whose works have provided material for movies as diverse as the classic Rear Window to the atom bomb with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie called Original Sin. As luck would have it, Black Angel falls closer to the Rear Window side of the coin than to the Original Sin side. Read More »

Jonathan Cold is back! Presumed dead after his last deadly mission, Cold proves that when you’re the best in the business, and your business is doing dirty deeds for the Company, staying dead is sometimes even harder than saving the world! I must confess that when I heard Cold was back in the game, two thoughts raced through my mind. The first one was that I couldn’t wait to see Cold use his unique talents to bust open whatever international terrorist scheme some third world dirtbag was attempting to unleash. The second thought I had was, “who the hell is Jonathan Cold?” Read More »