MonsterHunter

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 »

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 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 »

I suppose there’s a reality where a movie featuring an evil floating brain named Glyptofane Sex who is intent on preventing Earth from being re-seeded with human life isn’t just an example of the “let’s use a floating brain as a bad guy just because floating brains are intrinsically evil” school of filmmaking. Read More »

Bronx Executioner effortlessly takes its place in the pantheon of awesome post-apocalyptic Italian movies set in the Bronx! And it does it without being particularly post-apocalyptic and not really being set in the Bronx! Sure, the movie’s opening shots feature a nice tour of recognizable New York City landmarks and I think the Bronx Executioner himself had a badge that identified him as a New York cop, but the bulk of the action took place on mounds of dirt and a large derelict country villa that looked distinctly Italian. The post-apocalyptic aspect is likewise quite limited and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but what it lacks in sense, it makes up for in guys rolling down mounds of dirt! That’s a trade off I’ll make every time! Read More »

The difference between an American movie that kicks off a wave of films that the Italians milk until that particular cinema udder is really, really chapped and its imitators can be found in the names of the main characters in this movie and the one that it “borrowed” its “inspiration” from. In Escape From New York Kurt Russell played a guy who had to rescue the President from New York City which had been turned into a maximum security prison. Kurt’s name in the film was Snake. In this movie Mark Gregory has to protect the daughter of a CEO in a Bronx that the government has abandoned to its own devices. His name is Trash. Indeed. Read More »

When we last left headband-clad biker tough Trash at the end of Bronx Warriors, he was wandering the wreckage of his beloved Bronx after firing a grappling hook into Vic Morrow and briefly lamenting the death of the girl who had first caused him to rip off the plot of Escape From New York. Read More »

I realize that most of you are expecting to read something marginally amusing about how rotten this movie is. You want to hear me run the Muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, down for his penchant for staring dumbly about, like a little girl lost in a department store and about to wet her pants. You desire the expected cheap shot about how V.D. croaks out his meager lines like he’s had half his tongue removed while the remaining half is swelled up. Read More »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Four people including two white guys, a black guy, and a chick fly around in a helicopter after the living dead have run roughshod over our planet. These four people are holed up inside a rather large structure where they not only have to do battle against zombies with a sweet tooth for arms, legs and pig guts, but also against their fellow humans, thus provoking that often-asked and perpetually not-so-subtle question: Who are the real monsters? Read More »

As expected, Day Of The Dead (2008 edition - now with CGI!) is horrible, but in its defense, it never really gets as horrible as you assumed it would when you busted into the gun store, stocked up on Uzis, ammo, and machetes and hit the streets of small town America to hack your way through a batch of zombies accidentally unleashed by our clumsy government again. Sure, there were plenty of reasons to hate this movie (Mena Suvari as a tough as nails soldier? I had to look in the mirror to make sure some zombie virus hadn’t attacked my freaking brain when I heard that one!), but whenever my hatred would edge into murderous loathing territory, Nick Cannon would go and do something like kick a severed zombie head like a soccer ball while dispensing some potty mouthed bit of dialogue! Goooooal! Read More »

When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will *yawn*. Huh? What? Oh, yeah, I’m awake. Just sort of dozed off for a minute. You know, deep down I never really believed the various explanations that the Man gave out for these periodic attacks of undead terror cells. You’ve got your Trioxin barrels that keep getting lost and busted open. Or there’s always some comet or meteor or other vague outer space situation that might have caused Joe Zombie to start fussin’ and fightin’. Then you’ve got your virus that some goofball scientist created and inadvertently let loose when he was too busy playing with his Bunsen burner. But I think that Day of the Dead 2: Contigium really hits the nail on the head in the realism department when they have the end of the world hinge on a guy in an ugly shirt clutching a green Thermos. I mean, has any good ever come out of dudes who don’t know how to dress themselves wandering around with a Thermos? Read More »

This Roger Corman end of the world shocker (trust me when I tell you that there were some shocking moments in this one) was incredibly, filmed in nine days. I say that that was incredible because while watching it, I was thinking that they should have been able to do it in about a third of the time. 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 »

The year is 225 A.B. The A.B. stands for “after the bomb” and the world is a different place than the one we’re used to in Italian gore movies. Gone are the cities infested by zombies, gone are the tropical jungles infested by zombies, gone are the grottos infested by vampires. All that remains are buildings infested with rats. But not just any rats mind you, but rats that look suspiciously like guinea pigs with a nice bronzer applied. It’s all because of the radiation and the accompanying mutation you understand. It makes you wonder what guinea pigs look like in this new world! Read More »

Surprisingly, Roller Blade is not the first post-apocalyptic roller skating movie. Skatetown, U.S.A. and Roller Boogie both preceded it by a decade. And if you don’t think either of those films qualifies as post-apocalyptic, I don’t know what else you’d call one movie starring Linda Blair from the director of Truck Stop Women and another featuring (deep breath!) Patrick Swayze, Flip Wilson, Ruth Buzzi, Horshack, Marcia Brady, Scott Baio, and some chick from Little House On The Prairie! Read More »

When civilization has been destroyed! When the world has been reduced to a low budget friendly desert! When only a handful of people survive! When the rule of law is replaced by the savage rule of the wasteland! One man will stand above all others and command them with his bizarre vision of a new society where he screws all the fertile women and forced suicides are the order of the day to maintain a sustainable population! Such a tyrant can only be called…Kragg! And he could only be played by…Bull…from Night Court! Read More »

You know, for being chunks of rock whizzing through the air, filmmakers sure do give meteors a lot of credit when it comes to contributing to the end of civilization as we know it. I can recall films where meteors (or comets) have been blamed for such various debacles as making the dead walk the earth, turning people into dust, causing all electrical devices to rebel against their human masters (especially that semi with the Green Goblin on the front), and causing plants to run around eating people. This non-exhaustive tally does not include the movies where meteors do more routine damage like causing tidal waves and blocking out the sun with the debris they kicked up on deep impact causing Armageddon to ensue. Read More »

Here’s what I’m going to recommend to sensitive British chap Bill, the star of this BBC miniseries: a little less time giving me lectures about how we shouldn’t have a bunch of satellites in space protecting our national security and a whole lot more killer plant fighting. It isn’t bad enough that Bill is unable to contain his socialist/commie views to himself for the full two and a half hours of things, but once he decides to unload on us, he just pulls it straight out of his bum! Where else would his theory that everyone on Earth had been blinded not by killer meteors in league with killer plants (the most common sense explanation) but by some weapon up in space equipped with blinding radiation that went haywire and fried everyone’s optic nerve? Did your teachers ever tell you about the smell test? Basically, it posits that if the answer you came up with smells like it came from inside Bill’s left wing bum, then it probably did! Read More »

Hundreds of years from now Earth has been devastated by an atomic war! Mutant cavemen roam the planet’s surface at will, enslaving the humans still living in the open, while the technologically advanced humans cower underground! Even worse, a gang of toughs appear, call out the underground dwellers for being the pussies they are, steal their surprisingly sexy broads, and force the pansy men to build weapons for them! Then these toughs take their keg party up top and blast the piss out of the cavemen before the head bad boy kills the leader of the cavemen, thus cementing his position as King Bad Ass! Read More »