Reviews

Gaining from five more years of CGI technology advancements, this movie is far superior than the original Dungeons & Dragons, even if still lacking the blockbuster status. The story is a good one, for D&D standards, and most of the peculiarities of the game are well inserted in the plot. From the choosing of the five heroes to return the orb, each with his/her skills put in evidence during the course of the story, to the villains - a lich, a necromancer, an undead skeletal dragon - to the use of D&D deities - Obadai. All the choices in the movies are well done, the casting is very good, with a good mix of races and male and female heroes, and the total effect is a good cinematic adventure, better than a more publicized effort like the infamous Earthsea.

This is a very funny, often witty, always crude parody of the breaking Quentin Tarantino duology Kill Bill. Debbie Rochon is perfectly cast as Mulva, the woman in search of vengeance after a 5 years coma inducted by a gang of special characters, lead by the eponymous Teen Ape. The movie is of course a really low budget one, but it is full of clever ideas on how to make a good satire of such a couple of blockbuster movies and repeat several sequences made famous by Tarantino and his wonderful cast. Here we have a mostly amatorial cast, but Debbie Rochon is a really fun, fine, beautiful actress, able to tie you to the screen even without baring her really big assets, if you know what i mean. And for her fans out there - and we are many scores, perhaps hundreds of thousands - seeing her in this new part of her career - and she has a full schedule as you can see here on IMDb - is still good and i'm really very happy for her demonstrating that a good actress may emerge even without resorting to her last weapon: baring her breasts (even if a part of me is crying saying this words... o my Debbie...) All in all, a really good effort, short and still full of surprises. Thanks to all the people involved in the project for a good hour of fun.

Loosely based on the Italian comic book character Isabella - the first of the long series of erotic comic books that were published in Italy during the late Sixties - this is a so-so adventure-comedy, full of naked women, showing mostly their breasts, and full of clownish fight scenes, bad jokes and bad music. Zenabel discovers that she is the heiress of a duke killed by the evil Don Alonso and so she forms an army of women - a mix between Brancaleone's army and the women from Aristoteles comedy Lisistrata - to claim back her title. She will get what she wants, gaining also the love of a brigand in the meantime. Almost potable, for what is worth, and a good rendition of the original comic book on which it is based.

This is a non-typical example of a slasher movie from the Golden era of that genre, with a great cast of wanna-be stars (from Darryl Hannah and Rachel Ward to Adrian Zmed and especially Joe Pantoliano, almost impossible to recognize), a usual wooden scenario, a couple of interesting scenes - like the night attack against the bus by the prowler of this movie that will be re-enacted in Jeepers Creepers 2 and the very good finale - but also with several choices that are unusual in a movie of this kind. For example, there are no female nudities, only a sex scene - very tame for today standards and even for the slashers' standards - and way too many survivor at the end. For the rest, the movie is a little slow paced and definitely too dark for a great slasher, but it is still a must for the fans.

This is an embarrassing nth rehashing of the same plot in the nth bunch-of-idiots-young-adult-in-peril-because-they-are-idiots slasher movie of the early millennium: this time we get the story of a crazy miner who comes back from the dead to retake his gold from the hands of the usurpers. We have almost no thrills, almost no bare flesh (even if the girls are really hot only one of them goes showing her bare ass for a few seconds), the usual bunch of sunset boulevard horror stars in cameo roles (this time Karen Black, Richard Lynch, John Philip Law, Jeff Conaway), lots of fake blood, only the crazy miner resurrected as a zombie is cool enough to leave you stuck - well not exactly - to the screen till the end. Don't waste your time if you are not a completist.

One of the worst movies I've seen in the past few years, this is a sort of Secret Window gone bad (and Secret Window was definitely not so good, indeed!!). De Niro, who is collecting infamous roles in this era after the really bad Godsend, is a schizophrenic father of a sweet child (Dakota Fanning, the only good actress in this movie), who after the "suicide" of his wife is forced to grow up the child by himself. What follows is a very mediocre thriller, that is resolved at two third of the total time of the movie, so the last third is inane (with an ending that is called home way too long before). And, yes there is also Famke Jensen, in a minor - if decisive - role. She is still a beauty but doesn't save the movie - only the little girl.

A very creative independent movie from our friends the British, this direct to video experience is one of the most fascinating one I've seen in all of my life (and believe me, I've seen thousands of movies - more than 1.000 in the last eight years for sure): this is the charming story of a peculiar serial killer that videotape his victims and than put all of them on a video, to be exact over a video called "The last horror movie" - a by-the numbers American slasher movie - and put it into the shelves of a video rental store to follow the costumers who rent the movie till their home and then kill them after asking why they saw such a thing to the end. Full of the typical British humor that is almost always away from similar American productions - like the too often cited Henry portrait of a serial killer, that for me is inferior to this one - this one is a must.

This ludicrous piece of Italian early erotic cinema is a perfect exemplar of the movies of those years, with a naive will to be erotic without the dare to be really erotic. So this sort of historical drama around the sexual exploits of the young Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander Borgia and sister of the infamous Cesare Borgia - the hero of Italian historian Niccolò Machiavelli, his ideal prince in the homonymous political pamphlet - is more a comic book story than a real movie - and in fact inspired a sexy comic book the following year - a sort of mixture of secret sexual intrigues between the young and savage mid-European blonde beauty Olinka Berova - Ayesha in Hammer's Vengeance of She - and the not so young but equally reckless leader of the rebellion against the Pope Gianni Garko, and several sword fights and forest ambushes that seem to be taken by force from Robin Hood. Anyway, the movie is so bad that could be almost a cult for people who love such strange productions. For those only it could be worth a look.

This Spanish early Seventies movie is really boring in his depiction of several murders made by a really strange vampire (for most of the movie he is invisible and he doesn't bite the neck or other bodily parts of his victims - both male and female - but he strangles them, uh?), a German baron presumed dead in 1896.

It comes to his debauched blond heir to kill him and permit him to rest in peace.

Lot of assorted female nudities, almost always unrelated to sexual acts - the ladies are killed or assaulted during their baths - but very mitigated for today standards - but probably I've seen an edited version, because it was on Satellite TV -, so in the end the movie is totally dull, with a boring plot, bad acting, bad effects, no blood at all - and this is really strange for a so called vampire movie.