Tag Archives: reviews

REVIEW: Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

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Cannibal Holocaust (1980): A

This grandfather of the found footage genre is so grotesque that it makes Dead Alive look like Monsters Inc. The first time I saw it, it went from brutally violent, to funny, to brutally violent-er, to just plain sick, to art. The guy who made it was arrested after purporting that some actors died on camera. Right after it was released, the film was banned in multiple countries because they killed REAL animals for the movie (totally fucked) and there were all sorts of snuff legends surrounding the movie after the director got busted.

This film reviews the found footage of some white kids with their shit-eating white grins who go into the Amazon to look for a missing film crew. They find clues about where the crew disappeared to and they also find some cannibal tribes. I’ll let you fill in the blanks there.

You’ll get your gore-fix for sure with this one. There are plenty of gruesome corpses and quivering soon-to-be corpses including an iconic impaled American girl at the end (many believed this to be a real corpse, feeding the snuff rumors).

For me, the most fucked up scene is where the white search party tortures and butchers a large tropical turtle; the turtle dies slowly and painfully on camera. Why is this so messed up? It is a real turtle, not a fake turtle. No CGI turtle or turtle puppet. There is a real suffering animal dying on-screen. Ask anyone who has seen the film about “the turtle scene” and watch their facial expression change. It’s one of the few times in a horror film where, for me, there isn’t an ounce of amusement. The white kids rip it open, play with its guts as it squirms, and they do some eating. There are also real deaths of a snake, a tarantula, a couple of monkeys, and a pig, all of which are fucking sickening and sad.

These scenes are all onion-layers of depravity; it’s a totally evil Lord of the Flies style commentary on the real meaning of the words “civilization” and “savagery” because the American city clickers enter the mysterious “tribal” regions of the jungle and act like bigger barbarians than the actual cannibals who live there and cannibalize people. Then, when you zoom out another layer, you have to think about how the filmmakers sat there and filmed the torturous murders of real living things to try to convey the moral.

The “we are the real monsters” vibes are amplified in a way I have never seen in another horror movie. I can’t say that this film “scared” me, but it certainly pushed the envelope (and all my buttons) in a way that I will never forget.

 

REVIEW: The Swarm (1978)

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The Swarm-C-

Would you like to see a movie that is mostly just Michael Caine in a leisure suit yelling at people while he tries to bang that Stepford Wives lady? And bees are killing Texans? And it’s 2hrs and 35minutes long? And that homosexual guy from Shogun plays the skeptical bearded doctor? And then the Air Force sets the ocean on fire? Doesn’t that sound awesome?

Well, get ready to scratch your heads because they already made that movie and it sucks. This is the movie Michael Caine himself calls his worst movie.

I know what you’re thinking-what the fuck does Michael Caine know about movies? He’ll be in anything.

But in this case, he couldn’t be more right. This movie is worse than Jaws: This Time It’s Personal or whatever that was. It’s also not as funny as Blame It On Rio and has less boobs. The humor is mainly lacking in that it’s about African Bees invading Texas and none of those pig-fucking Texans’ deaths are played for laughs. If they had made the exact same movie but with the Bee attacks in fast motion and set to Banjo music….hell, you could call me a fan. But no one has the strength of vision to push it all the way any more.

There are some cool bee-poison hallucinations and bee’s-eye-view special effects. There’s also a shot of a real bee sitting on a leaf looking at the humans and -I shit you not-the bee actually somehow looks shifty-eyed and sneaky. Great casting and direction.

But everything else sucks, except for Michael Caine and Dr. Shogun. There’s not even a Queen Bee to fight at the end.

Basically a rip off of The Birds with bees instead of birds, which sets up an obvious franchise-merging sequel to both called “The Birds and the Bees”. I just thought of that idea right now. ©The Saddest Clown in the World 2013.

I’m in the book, Hollywood.

REVIEW: Inferno (1980)

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Inferno (1980): B

This is the second movie in Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy, these three movies about witches. The first one is really good, this second one is pretty good, and the third is notoriously shitty.

Evil spirits that take the form of girls from the 1980’s nightclub scene terrorize American dipshit Mark as he walks around Rome (and later New York) with this stupid mustache on his face, partially paralyzed by all the sudden attention he is receiving from spirit women and real women all at once. “Way to go, Mark!” he must be saying to himself at one point, while these incredibly white Paula Abdul back-up dancer looking ladies stare at him like he’s a piece of meat. I mean, look at the image I posted for this review. How is poor Mark going to pay attention in his stupid class when this Bond villain / Cyndi Lauper clone suddenly materializes? Answer: he isn’t. He is pretty alright with it until like a dozen stabbings happen.

He comes to New York to visit his sister Rose who suspects that she is living in a haunted apartment that was once home to an evil witch. Mark narrowly avoids being stabbed in Rome and then comes to New York where he narrowly avoids being stabbed again. Most of the movie involves sniffing around for the truth, sniffing that is punctuated with stabbings and maulings, narrowly avoided stabbings and maulings, and appearances by various female members of the New Kids on the Block fanclub.

Did I mention that there are stabbings? There are. We get multiple knifings to death and cat scratching to death that occur in typical overly-gory Argento fashion. There are some funny underwater dead bodies. Mysterious hooded strangers and a flock of Madonna stunt doubles everywhere.

There is an attempted lethal injection, which I LOVE in horror movies. It’s like when someone is stuck with a hypodermic needle, that gives the filmmakers carte balanche to do any crazy shit they want to them. Veins protrude, people turn different colors, or there is crazy black mouth blood. But, sadly, the needle never meets its mark.

The end is really fun too.

The movie has its downs, I suppose. Acting level: infomercial. The blood is some goofy-ass kool-aid looking shit (like most Argento) but the kill scenes are classic.

Strong recommendation.

REVIEW: Lady in the Water (2006)

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Lady in the Water: F

At first, after seeing all the trailers and being brainwashed by marketing, I thought this was going to be the “Death of a Salesman” of fantasy-horror movies where some archetype-defying low-man (played by a great actor) is the unlikely hero, and the genre is forever affected, but I was wrong as fuck. Instead, we get typical M. Night Shyamalan with his signature “twist” in the final act. This movie is just another tragic point along the director’s steep decline.

I always like the trailers for this guy’s movies and I am usually intrigued during the first fifteen minutes or so, but then everything falls apart. His movies remind me of a five course meal gone wrong. The appetizers are always good as hell and get your hopes up, but then later, he takes the lid off of a dogshit casserole that he spent the whole night disguising as prime rib, even though it smelled like shit for most of the night and all the guests KNEW they would be eating shit. Then while you are sitting there bloated and sick, feeling worse than you’ve ever felt in your life, for dessert, he dumps melted ice cream in your lap while flipping you off.

There are some neat camera angles I guess. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of something redeeming about this movie. Sure, Giamatti is a good actor, but that just makes it even more painful to watch this guy try to sincerely deliver this garbage movie he’s stuck in. I wonder if his agent called him and was like “it’s going to be like The Neverending Story except it’s going to suck really bad” and Giamatti was all “finally! A challenge worthy of my skills!”

I want to give Shyamalan some credit for being ambitious, but the movie was too hideous and ridiculous. I think maybe he was trying to make parts of it overly-simple or silly to give it a “fairy tale” vibe, but he is inconsistent with this; just when you start to think he is committed to a simple “fable,” the plot gets so sloppy that it was a challenge to watch the whole thing.

There are lots of characters, but not a single lovable one. Avoid at all costs.

REVIEW: Screamers (1995)

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Screamers (1995): C
Based on the Philip K. Dick story “Second Variety,” this movie kind of shows how Karl Marx was pretty good at predicting the evolution of capitalism but not very good at predicting the evolution of killer androids.

When the biggest intergalactic corporation in existence finds a new radioactive minable energy source to replace fossil fuels, everything’s great and they totally get some poor schmucks on an obscure planet to mine it for them. When studies reveal that it’s hella poisonous and it is responsible for massive fatalities, the corporation does exactly what you would expect: they stop mining the highly profitable material, responsibly compensate the families of the dead, and they give everyone hugs and kisses…

SIKE!

The corporation suppresses the truth and wants more, more, more, mining! “Civil war” breaks out between the corporate bosses and their “Alliance” of workers who refuse to die working the mines, and just like how ol’ Marx predicted, the capitalists dispatch military forces to keep the exploitation of the working class going; if you don’t work in the toxic mines, goons will bust a cap in you. This conflict matures and basically turns everyone on the planet into a soldier.

Added into the equation are robots created by the workers which are programmed to slaughter the corporate sponsored soldiers. They are called Screamers because of the sound they make as they fly through the air and chop motherfuckers. The Screamers’ AI becomes self aware and they decide that their mission should not be to chop corporate motherfuckers, but instead be to self-replicate and kill all humans, even their Alliance creators. They evolve into different “species” of Screamers that the humans are unprepared to combat including ones that look/act exactly like people. Ironically, Robocop is the head of the Alliance forces.

CGI is really bad, but it’s the 90’s, so get over it, I guess. Lots of funny kills and robot antics. One of them quotes Shakespeare. There are some cool philosophical undertones that touch on themes common in Dick’s work such as technology turning on / mimicking humans, perpetual human conflict beyond the planet Earth, and robots go boom. It’s got the isolation/paranoia aspect of The Thing and the corporation is the bad guy like in the Alien movies. All in all pretty fun and totally 90’s.

REVIEW: Underworld Evolution (2006)

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Underworld Evolution (2006): D-

This werewolf/vampire slayer, who also happens to be a vampire, teams up with a half werewolf half vampire dude to battle a gargoyle-vampire elder who is trying to free his werewolf twin brother from a thousand year old casket located in a Romanian cave maze so they can take over the world and turn it into a werewolf-vampire-gargoyle utopia which would probably be a dystopia if you aren’t a werewolf/vampire/gargoyle/werewolf-vampire-gargoyle.

The plot is such a fucking mess. You could watch it on mute and blast some 1990’s techno music and you’d probably understand the movie better than I did. There’s that convoluted vampire/werewolf business and then a bunch of medieval looking dudes who look like the Lord of the Rings elves with their ponytails dyed black. And fucking EVERYONE knows karate. It’s like they used a computer program to write the story, but before pushing “GENERATE,” they dumped a bucket of ice water on the motherboard and sparks started flying everywhere; “bzzz… beepbeep…blip bzzzzzVAMPIRE… bzzzWEREWOLF… bzzzLEATHER… bzzzzzSLOWMOTION… bzzzzzzGARGOYLEWORLDDOMINATION…” and, there it is: Underworld Evolution.

The action in the movie was unbelievable… ly played out Matrixesque unoriginality. It was impossible to take seriously for even a single second. This one dude pulls a rope attached to a helicopter and makes it crash to the ground. The color of the movie was a cold gray the WHOLE time and there are so many contorted CGI attack scenes that rival Transformers 3 that you could base a drinking game on them. You would think with pretty consistent attention-deficit-disorder-levels of editing, the movie would be at least occasionally entertaining but you would be wrong. After the tone is set in the first 15 minutes, you’ll be desensitized to the rest of the film; the whole movie is basically a looping 15 minute action sequence bookended by overacted conversation that is based on some clusterfuck exposition. Unless you have the memory of a fish, you will be unmoved.

REVIEW: Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005)

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Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005): C-

More like “Do You Like Made-for-TV-Bullshit?”

When a myopic Italian film student named Julio realizes his life is a Hitchcock movie, paranoia and delirium take him over and he becomes obsessed with figuring out what the hell is happening to him. What was he obsessed with before all this? Hitchcock movies! Man, what a mess.

It hurts me to talk shit about Argento. I feel pain while doing it. That’s how much I love this guy. This movie comes from a period in Argento’s career that I refer to as “The Stretch of Time in Which Argento Made Garbage Movies.” None of his trademarks are in this movie except really overt vocal dubbing and a crop of breasts. There is minimal gore. No one crashes through a window. No one with black leather gloves runs around molesting people. It looks like an after school special about not doing drugs where you can just tell all the actors are virgins.

This stretch of bad Argento movies fucking depress me. Imagine your favorite musician spends a decade not playing music. Instead, he just practices getting really good at using those gloves with light-up fingertips to make trippy light patterns that only look cool if you are 16 and at a rave. Makes me sick.

The movie has virtually no signature Argento. But you know what this movie does have? A fucking stupid moped/car chase. Probably the worst one I have ever seen. As far as moped/car chases go, it gets an F.

The movie is a formulaic homage factory. It felt like Argento had a checklist of Hitchcock’s films and he was just powering through them, making all the references he could, just wiggling his fingers in those stupid fucking light-up gloves. I dare you to watch this with your pretentious friend who considers himself a film buff. He will let out so many obligatory giggles to show you how he’s getting all the references.

I will admit there is a dimension of suspense that transcends the straight-to-DVD feel of the film. I somehow hated the characters but still wanted to know what was going to happen next. Maybe this was because I was naively optimistic, but maybe it was because parts of the movie were better than abysmal. I’m the wrong person to ask.

I think they should make a sequel called Do You Like Michael Bay? in which the protagonist believes they are living out the plot of a Michael Bay movie. Truly terrifying.

REVIEW: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

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Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962): A

I have to apologize for yesterday’s review of “Mommie Dearest”. Apparently there WAS a real Joan Crawford and she was in the movies and she really DID like to make her children eat raw steak.

And also, she’s in this movie.

In a twist, she’s the one getting psychologically and physically abused. The abuser is her sister who doesn’t like her because she’s crippled and used to be more famous.

One thing I like is the way this movie handles the cripple. It’s hard to do cripples right because the line between pathetic and funny is just gossamer thin. This movie goes the pathetic route and….nails it! Joan Crawford played a scared, abused, helpless person really well. Maybe she was using her daughter for inspiration, I don’t know. But it works.

The sister is played by Bette Davis from the classic late 80’s nighttime soap opera “Arthur Hailey’s Hotel”. But apparently she was famous for other things before that and one of those is this movie and another is some fetish movie from way back in the 30’s.

Anyway, the sister is a fucked up child star from the 10’s who used to be known as “Baby Jane Hudson”. She had a creepy singing act with her father. They also made dolls that were exact replicas of her 8-year old body and sold them to people who liked to have them. She tried to make the switch to movie stardom in the 30’s, but she hella sucked. Meanwhile, Joan Crawford, who was the ugly duckling sister when Baby Jane was a star, made it as a respected actress.

But then Joan Crawford gets crippled, and Baby Jane has to take care of her and as the movie opens they’ve been shut-ins for the last thirty years.

They have a nice house and are still rich. They’re still so rich, Baby Jane gets liquor delivered to the door! Then she falls in love with this fat British piano player and starts to plan a comeback and gets meaner to Joan Crawford, who can’t do jack because of the crippling.

Bette Davis is way nuts in this movie and is scary as hell. She wears children’s clothes and dances around and plays with dolls of herself. Baby Jane also serves dead animals to Joan Crawford, who apparently had given up meat because this upsets her.

So there’s lots of tension and well-done suspense but the movie ends with Baby Jane’s dream of being watched by a crowd again coming true, even though she’s just spinning around on the beach with an ice cream cone in each hand.

And Joan Crawford gets a long rest. The final shot is really touching.