Reviews

This Indian horror outing is a foray into Indian folklore and for some reason it makes excellent horror. This is an finely crafted movie that has excellent cinematography and equally excellent sound design and it has an incredible atmosphere. This is a story about gods, greed and the attempt to make ends meet, even if it means angering the gods. It has gothic horror and a fantastic set design from the inside of a gods womb to rain lashing down outside, it never disappoints. It doesn't go for the easy kill or scare jump, this one will come creeping up on you. Far superior to most western horror movies and then it is fresh and original. It is subtitled and in Hindi, the basic story is laid out in the beginning of the film, so keep your eyes peeled and spool back, it you missed something, that will make this movie much easier to understand.

Quite unusual and mesmerizing vampire tale, that break with traditions. Mackenzie Rosman delivers an amazing performance as the main character, vampire Rowena. This is a vampire flick with good story and it is well executed, I find it very enjoyable and rewatchable, it deserves to be much better known than it is. It reminds me a little about Abel Ferrara's The Addiction.

Can you keep a secret? Because this is a secret Danish masterpiece. I rather enjoyed having it all for myself, but I feel it is so great, that I ought to share. Imagine a world stuck sometimes in the late 60s or early 70s. The technology, architecture and furniture design all indicates it. Everyone lives a new life every day, as the old way lead to people leading unhappy lives and committed suicides. Instead Madam Data, the mainframe computer, assigns you a new home, spouse, kids, friends and work, every day and makes sure you never meet the same spouse twice. It is an adaption of a Danish sci-fi novel from 1980 and it looks a lot like the dystopian movies of the 60s and 70s, such as Fahrenheit 451(1966), Z.P.G.(1972), and Soylent Green(1973) Here, the man Elef happens to fall in love with Maya, his wife for a day. But how do you get more days with the same person? Its prohibited, and those who seek it are called "The Locked Persons". Those who do not eat their Nightpill, so the Assistant Service can pick them up at night and move them to a new place with new spouse, kids etc. Assistant Service move people and police the rules in the Orwellian society. The chemistry between Elif(Jens Jørgen Spottag) and Maya(Kaya Brüel) works to the advantage of the film, making it a unique experience. It has been shown on Danish TV a few times and is today available for streaming on DR's (Danish Television) homepage, if you live in Denmark. So due to the language barrier and geoblock restrictions, I will probably be able to keep this masterpiece a secret a little longer, only shared with a few other Danish residents.

If you see Hearts And Armour you'll encounter a strikingly beautiful knight's tale with excellent cinematography of Dante Spinotti. Fantastic score by Cooper And Hughes, I wish it was available on CD. 3 women becomes knights to fight for love and fight for what they believe in, played by the beautiful Tanya Roberts, Barbara De Rossi and Zeudi Araya. It takes place during the moors invasion in Italy. There is quite a lot of magic involved. And gruesome sights of people broken on the wheel. Strikingly beautiful Italian landscapes form the background to this drama. Sometimes confusing, always deeply rewarding. The quest for king and honor and in spite of all, the search for peace. The beautiful end will stay with you.

Formula movie about the illegitimate son of a rich Chilenian who stands to inherit a fortune and gets mixed up in the affairs of bad guys and falls in love with a beautiful female lawyer (Vargas). It looks very much like a TV movie, not really exciting. The only reason I bothered to see it was because Valentina Vargas was in it. No real surprises here, though it is nice to see Vargas. Great looking Chilenian landscapes on display but Malcolm McDowell's part is very small and doesn't add much to the movie. Michael Ironside plays as usual a bad guy but this is not one of his most memorable parts. The chase scenes are standard fare.

The film opens by showing life in a Paris suburb and the portal to a slaughterhouse with its monument of a bull in brass and then we move inside the slaughterhouse. The camera is like a fly on the wall, it sees everything but never interact or interfere with what's happening. And for anyone not raised on a farm where they did their own slaughtering, this is indeed a shocking document: A horse collapses in 1 second as it is shot with a bolt pistol in the head and a cow tumbles after a hammer with a long pipe on the hammerhead has been buried in its skull. But that is just the starter on this blood feast. The main cause being numerous calves beheaded and a row of sheeps having their throat slit and in between that animals being flayed and gutted. The slaughterhouse has its own stream in the floor, where rivers of blood is running from the slaughter. I can imagine urbanized children having nightmare for weeks after seeing this film..and their parents forsaking the meat for vegetarian delicacies after this remorseless view of the animals demise to satisfy the meat-eaters cravings. I am a vegetarian myself, not out of conviction, but because I was raised that way and as a such, I am thankfully free from dealing with the dilemma of wanting the meat but not wanting to deal with the the killing and butchery. Today death of animals has become a remote affair to most people, out of sight, out of mind. Not so when you see this film. Black and white images can indeed be gruesome, color just wouldn't have made this film worse. Even the squeamish should find the courage to view this film, just once! This is what death looks like when a real artist trains his lens on it, it is beautiful too! 10/10

How should you a approach a movie like The Invincible Pole Fighters? If you wanna look for hairs in the soup, look for all-too-obvious stage setting for the Yang brothers ambush. Then you could look for some very stagy looking death scenes. Or how about the library music it shares with Dawn of the Dead? On the other hand you could look for its virtues: Strong cast, strong story, excellent choreography and fortunately the virtues of this movie far outweighs its flaws. The story is epic, the choreography is nothing short of breath taking. The equals may exist. I just haven't seen them, this is riveting stuff, utterly infectious. Show it to non-martial art movie fans if you wanna see converts, this is martial arts to the performed to the highest standard of perfection. You will want to see this movie again and again. Own it. The best available copy is Celestial's Hong Kong DVD release in original aspect ratio without dubbing. Beware of bad dubbing and choreography-ruining cropping on western VHS releases.

One of the all time great music-melodramas. Christopher falls in love with the beautiful singer Alley, but he got a problem: He must stay inside a sterile plastic dome due to rare disease. This is a modern day "Love Story" with a gender-twist. Colorfully shot in L.A. with concert and music clips of a handful of very catchy tunes. Tawny Kitaen is very, very cute and sexy as Alley, this is her best movie, so if you're a fan, step right up. A gory dream sequence has been cut on UK video, however it got a few scenes in it not included on the Danish video. It certainly looks as if the screenwriter have seen Cinderella '80, another excellent movie, as it shares a lot of elements with that one (minus melodrama). This movie needs a DVD release. My almost 2 decades old VHS tape can do with a replacement.

What do you do if you are a small drought stricken village in Thailand that just lost the head of its religious shrine to theft, the Ong-Bak Buddha statue? And of cause it happens just the week before the biggest religious feast in 24 years. Answer: You send your best Thai boxer to Bangkok to recover it and kick butt on the bad guys. Ting is your basic boyscout: He won't fight for money and he would rather run than fight. But fate wants it otherwise: Ting get to fight a lot, for his life, for his friend and for Ong-Bak and he gets to run a lot and in the process of doing just that he displays the most amazing martial arts skills it an almost endless series of breakneck stunts, all done by himself without wires, stunt doubles or special effects. If you thought Johhny O & co. from JackAss were doing wild stuff, take a look at this. I don't recall having seen Jackie Chan or Jet Li doing crazy stuff like this. This is an action orgy glued together by a decent story, amazing direction and photography.If action and martial arts is up your alley you will want to see this amazing movie. Tony Jaa starring as Ting is a rising star. Seatbelt for your armchair is optional but recommended, buckle up and let the ride begin!

Simple and enjoyable animations done using Flash. Our two protagonists are both eggs: Weeble and his little egg friend Bob. Among their friends are a mushroom pirate, a hobbyhorse donkey and some rebellious jams. The stories are many of them absurd and surreal, Weeble and Bob roll around and do things that would be offensive if done by humans (and may still be to some). The animations are very short, most of them a minute in length or less and their quality varies greatly. As they are available online you should make the effort of seeing them, furthermore 1h of them has been published on a DVD called wobbl and bob, only available from the website. It's worth noting that some episodes have been reedited with different music for the DVD release.

This is your classic Saturday matinée movie, just done with more gore. It offers the best production values of any Italian cannibal movie, it has an all star cast, excellent production values, it really looks great. Or, to be more specific: It looked great: The DVD prints in circulation today are made from color faded Kodak Eastman prints. They are not made to last, so when I saw it in the cinema in 1979 it looked great and colorful. Still...if faded colors doesn't ruin your day, there is plenty to enjoy. Ursula Andress offers some of the best celeb-nudity caught on film. Being in her mid-forties, she still looks absolutely fantastic. My suggestion to you is to suspend your disbelief, find your best chair, lower the lights and press play to enjoy 8/10.

Hallmark has spent a lot of money on their "Family Robinson" tale and it looks gorgeous, the money is there to behold in lavish sets, great cinematography. I saw this purely by chance, when I ordered the wrong DVD (should have been the Spanish Stranded from same year!), nevertheless it provides 3 hours of pretty decent entertainment for all but the youngest children. The violence by the end of the film may not make it ideal choice of entertainment for pre-schoolers. TV director Charles Beeson directs a cast of lesser-known actors but Brana Bajic as Lara Robinson is certainly a looker! Other than that the cast is pretty anonymous and misses the mark when it comes to suspense. Few surprises here, this is a classic whitehat/blackhat movie. The kids will love it, but the grown-ups may find this a bit anemic. Will do nicely on a rainy day, however and the lavish tropical pictures will linger on.

Shame comes home and find his mate, June, abducted by...well..peckers! His ape explains in graphic details how June was aroused and abducted by the penises and demonstrated how it...well...spanked the monkey when the peckers aroused June. Lotsa slapstick, politically incorrect humor, not just about sex, but also about colonization ("Africa - the continent where life is spun by a thinner thread than other places"). The animation is fluent and rich, the soundtrack is rock'nrolling and this is really a bellylaugh-a-minute movie. Some people are likely to find the movie quite provocative but this is better natured than Fritz the Cat, which on occation turned quite violent without the redeeming humor, but there is certainly a kinship. The humor occationally gets quite elephantine, quite literary! Highly entertaining. 7/10

It is difficult to prepare people exactly for what they are going to see, this movie is a class act of its own: Made by the sixties maestro of improvisation, Ray Dennis Steckler, and this is his true masterpiece. It is jawdroppingly hilarious at every turn and totally inept at the same time, but it is FUN. Much better than most self-confessed comedies. Director Steckler, who always worked without a script, started this little monochrome movie as a dark, sinister thriller about 3 thugs harassing and stalking his gorgeous real-life wife, Carolyn Brandt. For reasons unknown he becomes pretty quickly fed up with the thriller, so our two protagonists are rushed in to a closet and stumbles out in Batman and Robin-like attires as the crimefighting duo, Rat Pfink and his assistant Boo Boo. At this point Rat Pfink feels that needs to remind Boo Boo that they have one weakness: Bullets! And then they are ready to rock. Highspeed chases at 20mph follows, speeded up by the oldest movietrick in the world: Fast motion. An incredibly inept fistfight in a backyard ensues, where poor Boo Boo stumbles and falls all over the place and in between all this our hero just whips out a guitar to sing a song for no reason whatsoever and everyone starts dancing. Steckler hijacked a local town parade for his movie, as his sub-shoestring otherwise wouldn't allow for such extravaganza. Time to round up your buddies for a good laugh, the more, the marrier. Like the crows sing in Disney's Dumbo: "I have seen everything, when I see an elephant fly" 9/10

This is an almost epic tale of fighter and son trying to avenge the death of the old shaolin master, fighting the evil master, infused with humor and style it follows the flight from the evil Pai Mei and his henchmen, disguising as theatre troups performing Shaolin Kung Fu shows for a period and the tiger-style fighter Hsi-Kuan settles down with a crane-style fighting wife and have a son to prepare for epic battles with Pai Mei. Hsi-Kuan's and Yung Chung's marriage and wedding night on board a boat is a very funny highlight of the film. Telling more about what happens would be telling too much, but the battles with Pai Mai are spectacularly set. 7/10

Talk about buried treasures, this is such a one: A tough, gritty movie that has the feel of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Aldrich has produced a no-holds barred roadmovie about a female freewrestling tag team, marvelously played by drive-in favorite Laurene Landon and Vicki Friderick and Peter Falk plays the girls greasy manager, a perfect role for him. The team wrestles in rundown industrial towns in hardhitting, brutal battles. Amazing choreography is sure to keep you at the edge of the seat However many are likely to find this movie too brutal for their taste, so if Rollerball is you cup of tea, step right up. If you taste more goes in direction of Driving Miss Daisy, this may not be the movie for you. Overdue for DVD release. 9/10

This is classic martial arts with everything that comes with it, including, to start with the downside first: A terrible English dub. The videotape I saw was also cropped. But if you can past that and get on to the movie you're in for a positive surprise. Drunk Shaolin.. is as good as it gets and offers a great sense of humor without getting silly. In brief the story is about a Chinese man who happens to be a kung fu expert marries a Japanese girl who is a an avid karate fighter. Trouble is certainly ahead as she chucks out her husband's Chinese kung fu weapons to make room for her own Japanese weapons, even worse: He insults her karate she takes it personally as so does her teacher in Japan and a group of his crack students, so they are off to China to challenge her husband to a duel. What follows is a fantastic display of Japanese contra Chinese weapons and techniques presented with considerable style as well as humor. I watched this film many times, it is joy forever. 8/10

Halfbreed Keoma returns from the war and lots of things has changed to the worse, so there is work to do for an honest gunfighter. We are introduced to his childhood in flashbacks and get the reason for him standing up to the oppressors ruling the town. The film is practically choreographed like a ballet with a sense of visual style that is rare to see. Olga Kalatos stars as a pregnant woman and is yet again cast in a tragic role, remember her getting beaten in Purple Rain, where she stars as Prince's mother or her getting a very long splinter in the eye in Zombie 2? Well..., she is not much better off here! Add to this a catching tune, the songscore comments on the story like a greek chorus. This is extremely stylish stuff, for spaghettifans this is not to be missed. 9/10

Them southern folks are for sure a breed of their own. Pleasentville are celebrating a centennial and all the nice folks passing by from the north are invited to crash! Soon the party is on and them folks are having a barrel of fun with fingerlickin' good ol' fashioned guts and gore. Primitive effects by present day standard but nostalgic like heck, great score, you'll find yourself singing and humming "The Pleasentvally Boys" song "The South Shall Rise Again". One can view this film as a story about racism and unequality in US and especially in the south, but that would probably be to put too much in it. Rollickin' good hillbilly horrormovie that will stand up to repeated viewing. 9/10

Looks as if the Robocop writer has been wholesale looting The Vindicator. This is a very solid horror/action movie about a man set up in an accident to be used in cruel experiment. Anyone who have seen Robocop knows the story. Watch out for Pam Grier as a bitchy and darn good looking assassin. This highly effective, violent and bloody horror movie may not be to everyones liking, but this Canadian outing is well worth seeking out for anyone who is fan of the genre. 8/10

This one seems to be everyones pet hate for some reason, but it really doesn't deserve all that bad press. It is a more than decent sci-fi movie in Road Warrior territory. The rulers use water shortage to upress the masses but the magic ball Bodai and The Solarbabies on rollerskates take up the fight. Nice work by Lucas Haas and the beautiful Jamie Gertz, a highly underrated actress. High budget insures high productionvalues, this film both look and sounds good. 7/10