MonsterHunter

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’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 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Normally when a movie claims to be 64 minutes long and the copy I’m watching clocks in at an emaciated 52 minutes, I would be raising holy hell, whining about how I was ripped off, mislead, lied to, and that I don’t need some namby-pamby sissy boy censoring my videos. In the case of Cat-Women of the Moon, however I felt like somebody up there liked me when this crime against nature abruptly terminated its insidious transmission, apparently 12 minutes early. Read More »

Just like I can never get enough of misfits taking on suicide missions to defeat the Nazis, just like I can never get enough of underdog athletes beating evil Russians/big city schools/rich country club puds, and just like I can never, EVER get enough of one cop playing by his own rules to single-handedly bring down terrorist plots against our super sweet freedom-loving country, I also can’t get enough of alien parasites, pods, eggs, slugs, and Martians getting their icky extraterrestrial butts shot, blown up, frozen, incinerated, stabbed, and just generally kicked by a handful of underpaid, underemployed actors that only look vaguely familiar! Read More »

I picked this particular title up out of the steaming heap of anime that generally featured big-eyed ten year old girls in short cheerleader skirts fighting off horny demons with lots of frisky tentacles because I thought it would be cool instead of deviant. Don’t get your hopes up though, this one isn’t deviant either. Whatever possessed me to think that any kind of anime could be cool? Two words: space pirates! Read More »

In space no one can hear you scream “filler episodes!” Volume 2 of the Cosmo Warrior Zero saga features episodes 5-8 of the thirteen episode series and is highlighted by space pirate Captain Harlock’s giant guard cow rampaging through a wild west town. Usually, those sort of bovine antics would be enough to unhesitatingly recommend the title (even if there was never any of the expected giant cow pie scenes that such a creature promised), but while the story even has a midget killing the giant cow with a bazooka, things grind to a halt when they haul out that most tired of cliches whenever someone is hunting someone else that they secretly respect. Read More »

Engineered to the be the perfect killing machine. Part man. Part robot. All ass kick! Cyber Warrior One will be the soldier of the future for the American military. Unaffected by extreme heat and cold, impervious to biological weapons and various and sundry toxins, and completely obedient in following all orders, no matter who wrong they may be, this ultimate force of devastation and freedom-spreading vengeance will continue to ensure our great country’s superiority for generations! But what if this cyborg was accidentally let loose on an unsuspecting world? What if it escaped before its orders could be downloaded into its electronic brain? What if the bunch of losers who were guarding it on a ship bumped into the closet holding Cyber Warrior One during a brawl over a poker game and let it out? Read More »

The Cyber-Tracker (or “CyberTracker” depending on the movie) franchise is brought to an explosive conclusion in this sequel which is positively cybertastic! Three long years after the events in the first CyberTracker film, Eric, Connie, and Jared return to do battle once again with evil cyborgs who are charged with enforcing the law, but have this disconcerting habit of being used to kill innocent people and assassinate politicians. The stakes are even higher though this time around because the Cyber-Trackers come in all sorts of awesome flavors! Read More »

It’s time for another one of those bargain basement action icon team ups that can occasionally nudge a movie like Cyber Tracker from cyber crapper status all the way up to cyber clunker status! Much like the Jeff Speakman flick Scorpio One which had the Perfect Weapon take on Brent “Huffbo” Huff of Strike Commando 2 fame, Cyber Tracker creams the undiscerning action audience’s jeans with the mouth watering showdown between Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Richard “The Kick Fighter With A Mullet” Norton. If it doesn’t stack up to the fight on the space station between Speakman and Huff where Speakman smacked Huff in the head with a fire extinguisher, that just goes to show that when you have such legends brawling, the edge often comes down the intangibles. Intangibles like space stations and fire extinguishers. 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 »

From the four corners of the world, eight cyborgs leave their current civilian lives, putting their dreams of being a race car driver, ballerina, and bull fighter (what?) on hold so that they might help one of their own and also to save Earth! Once they join forces, the greatest super team of all team is back in action! Yes true believer, your suspicions are well-founded! The dream is alive and well! Finally after twenty-five years, the Galaxy Legion has reunited to combat evil, to cast light upon the dark, and to find out how 006’s career as a matador is working out! Read More »

Typically uninteresting alien invasion story mixed with an evil government agency’s hidden agenda that’s saved by a healthy dose of Scalia! Professional macho man Jack Scalia plays a guy haunted by his past! But not just any guy! As we’re told by a dude checking out his credentials, Scalia was special forces in Vietnam, winning the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and even the frigging CMH! That’s Congressional Medal of Honor to you liberal pansies who hid in Canada when your country needed you most! 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 »

When you have a successful film franchise and you’ve already churned out about fifty sequels, you want to keep it going, but you need to do something to make it seem new and exciting. I can’t believe people ever tire of seeing Godzilla laying the smack down on some lackluster monster every other year, but somebody decided the series needed a kick in the green, scaly tail because it’s time for the “all star team-up” movie. Read More »

Anytime I watch a movie and the opening credits roll by saying that it is based on a play, I cringe. If you’ve ever been to a play (and really, why would you if have anything resembling a life?) the one thing that is the hallmark of the form is that the characters talk and talk and talk some more. Read More »

I don’t know where all the flying brains were in this movie. If you’ve got yourself an early 1950s movie about a killer brain, it either ought to fly around or have grown to gargantuan size, preferably both. The only thing the brain in this one does is sit in a bunch of dirty water in a fish aquarium! Read More »

This is one of those classic sci-fi movies from the 1950s complete with great title. The real question is whether it’s actually any good to sit through or does it just sound like it’s good to sit through. Well, for the most part, it’s not really particularly any good and it’s not really laughably bad. Much of the movie is boring, though you are rewarded with some pretty good saucer attacks at the end of things. Read More »

Sometimes I lay awake at night on my stained mattress and ponder what the future holds for planet Earth. What wonders will we see come to pass? Flying cars? Cures for all diseases? An end to hunger and other cruddy stuff? But then the morning arrives along with cruel reality! And I hit my research library of Roger Corman sci-fi movies! And the terrible future that awaits us becomes clear! The year is 2020! Man has gone and pooped all over the planet! There is only one hope left! An evil corporation named Martel will use an underwater lab to save all of us! By harassing some aliens that have taken up residence nearby! Read More »

It was 1988. Only a year had passed since Strike Commando had invaded our cinemas and our hearts. Strike Commando fever was everywhere, from guys dying their hair Reb Brown Blonde to an attendance spike at Disneyland following the Strike Commando’s heartfelt endorsement of it to a dying native boy. Almost as easily as he had defeated the Big Russian twice on the big screen, Rebbo had become an silver screen icon along side the likes of Trash from Bronx Warriors and Bronx Warriors 2, the adult dwarf who played the child of a woman in Burial Ground and kept trying to suckle her, and Dean Jones. Eventually, the inevitable question came up for the team behind Strike Commando - what next? 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 »

One of the great truisms of our universe is that if Mars isn’t invading Earth, then we are invading Mars. Like a couple of feuding neighbors that dump dead birds in the others’ pools and send the Jehovah’s Witnesses to one another, both planets can’t seem to get by without trying to take a space dump on the other one. Hollywood caught on to all this interplanetary intrigue a long time ago and the whole genre probably peaked in the fifties and sixties with 1959’s The Angry Red Planet being a worthy effort distinguished by its serious tone, interesting message and the use of Cinemagic. Read More »

As is usually the case in $18,000 movies, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans are infinitely more interesting than the half-finished product someone barfed up on screen. The liner notes by film historian Tom Weaver for The Astounding She-Monster recount a few amusing anecdotes that surrounded this movie’s production. Probably the best among them is the story of how they got villain Keene Duncan to double as a bear by wearing a bear skin suit for a fight scene, only to have him almost suffocate because he was smoking a cigarette inside the suit while they were filming. Read More »

If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably sat in front of the TV buried in Cheeto dust while watching some Godzilla flick or other and had one thought: How cool would it be to see Matchbox cars and model trains get destroyed not by Asian guys in rubber suits, but by some gigantic stop motion scorpion? And instead of a little Japanese kid named Kenny getting in the way of things, you had a little Mexican kid named Cornholio (or something like that) playing stowaway while the blonde hunk with the immovable hair, ably assisted by his ethnic sidekick, drops right down into the scorpion’s secret hideout to check things out while his sexy rancher girlfriend waits anxiously topside? You’d have monster bug action at its cookie cutter best! Read More »

I suppose you’ve got to expect a little brain eating activity when you live in a quiet little town like Riverdale, Illinois. Though grossly under-reported by our traitorous liberal media, the War on Terror has been fought in one horse hamlets like Riverdale for decades! Alien invasions, body snatchings, gigantic insects, arachnids, animals, unnatural swarms of same, ghosts, regular old serial killers, cults, periodic appearance by Satan and/or his minions, and biker gangs all routinely take their shots at taking everything good and clean about this country and making it a big steaming heap of evil poop soup! Read More »

At first glance this movie seemed to have everything going for it. It was directed by Eugène Lourié, who unleashed the British giant monster movie Gorgo upon an unsuspecting world. It involved a brain transplant gone horribly awry. It even had a gigantic robot played by a seven foot two inch circus freak running amok in the Big Apple! Once I had seen it though, I was able to see that perhaps all the above-mentioned factors may actually have only been an indication of a deservedly semi-obscure mess that starred Ross Martin. Ross Martin? He was famous for being a sidekick to a short dude! (Admittedly, a short dude who would fight you if you knocked his battery of his shoulder, but short nonetheless.) Read More »

In the late 1950s, one name was synonymous with mountains and monsters and that name was Forrest Tucker. Tucker, who would later cement his legendary status by starring in the legendary television show, F-Troop, appeared in The Abominable Snowman in 1957 where he got chomped by psychic Yetis over in the Himalayas. Only a mere one year later, he would strap on his hiking boots for another go round when he almost got chomped by giant one-eyed psychic aliens in The Crawling Eye. Read More »

It’s Satan vs. the Mullet! In outer space! With not much at stake! And one of the more bogus mysteries of all time solved! I’ll be the first to admit though that despite that really great set up, the movie failed to deliver on its obvious promise. The movie’s script was the root of its problems since I didn’t understand anything that was happening. Twin brothers apparently wrote it and they must have been using that twin ESP all twins have so that it made sense to them, but not to us non-twins that weren’t plugged into their secret language. 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 »

If you’ve ever sat through Son of Godzilla or Godzilla: Final Wars and wished that all the Godzilla garbage was excised so that the focus could be on Kamacuras, The Deadly Mantis is a dream come true! Kamacuras was of course the giant flying praying mantis that made cameo appearances in both of those Godzilla outings. Though not on screen for long, much like when Kumonga the giant spider puts in an appearance (usually via stock footage), you feel a kinship with these Joe Sixpack monsters. They ain’t too fancy looking or got any cool powers and they usually are just content to mind their own business until one of the big name monsters causes them problems. These are the monsters of the proletariat! Read More »

When British novelist John Wyndham wasn’t busy crafting stories about killer plants taking over the world (The Day Of The Triffids), he was busy crafting stories about killer brats taking over the world. Village of the Damned is the movie version of his novel The Midwich Cuckoos and an interesting premise is let down by an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. 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 »