Reviews

A charmless, sluggish, joyless spectacle lacking thrills or horror, the Raven offers nothing and has absolutely nothing to say. Cusack gives little effort in raising his Poe beyond a slightly witty curmudgeon, but fails even this, as his wit is witless and his charm suffocating in wood. The "Poe-themed" crimes are an artless display lacking neither the campy fun of a Hammer death nor the sleaze of Saw-inspired torture: like the movie itself, they serve no purpose but to further PLOT, and when PLOT is as half-hearted as it is in the Raven, it is not long before the audience is snoring in sleep.

After a perfectly fine Masquerade Ball sequence, the film's thrilless plot begins rolling, and it is as fresh and enticing as moldy toast. Tired sequence after tiring sequence follows, full of mediocre mystery, devoid of either realism or originality. The (obvious) villain, once he is (obviously) revealed, gives the dull, canned reasons for the murders any viewer of average-intelligence expected all along. No interesting conflict is addressed, no true or heroic or even interesting mountain must Poe climb- the audience is left feeling as hollow as the film's heart, and even the James Bond-influenced closing credits can't save them from feeling like they have experienced a goofy pockmark of clichés. Goofy, yet not goofy enough to be enjoyable. But sadly perhaps just goofy enough to annoy, and turn some off Poe forever.

Any superficial enjoyment the usual snarky MST3K crowd of Hollywood- pandering mall-snobs could find in an independent movie like Galaxy Invader should be abated a bit by how downright depressing it is. The alien is really only a plot device, a MacGuffin to propel the story into one dealing with human ignorance and greed, and an examination of the little tyrant of a dysfunctional family. This is one of the most bleak and depressing depictions of a family I have ever seen, with an enabler of a mother, a cowering, toady son, and two daughters that hate their father, who rules over all in a torn shirt that symbolizes his own ethical laziness and moral bankruptcy. There are some fine, funny scenes in Galaxy Invader, such as when a dummy spirals off a cliff at stunning velocity, but all the funny scenes are soured by what came before them, be it the senseless depravity carried out on an alien life form or the spectacle of a sweaty, enraged father wrestling to the death with his own son.

The overall ambiance of Galaxy Invader is one of hopelessness and desperation. Where meeting an alien being should elicit a scene of joy and wonder, or in a Hollywood movie some schmaltzy E.T. crap, here in an independent feature we are given a vision of a close encounter that seems startlingly disturbing and ugly and born of dull dark reality, the beer-soaked jungles of gristly redneck life. The invader at the center of Galaxy Invader doesn't come from another planet: it comes from the galaxy of our own bitter, corrupt hearts.

This is my least favorite type of movie: Hollywood's attempt at showing how the rest of the country is stupid and brazen for celebrity. Yes, this is actually a subgenre of movies, though the opposite is a more accurate statement.

"Black comedies" with goofy scores and over-the-top performances offer nothing: too superficial to be insightful, too withdrawn to be prescient, the only advantage they offer is for a certain type of bloated self-hating American to feel smugly superior to his/her compatriots and a false sense of camaraderie with the snobbish purveyors of tasteful propaganda of Hollywood who they would love to "rub elbows" with.

What's worse, this movie is misogynist, portraying vapid proto-Stepford Wife Nicole Kidman (all too easily playing the dumb blonde winking at the camera) as a career woman hell bent on getting to the top of her field (this is a bad thing?) at the expense of her lazy husband's wishes to impregnate her and have her work at his business.

What's far worse, however, is for a movie like this, so so-called "sophisticated" and "edgy" when it came out, to be so uselessly out of date. In the 21st century Television is grandpa's game and the cult of celebrity is open to anyone willing to work hard with air.

A movie satirizing celebrity culture that isn't totally predictable and actually has something interesting to say? Now that I'd like to see, but it would have to be made by some of us dumb hicks east of Hollywood, and we'd never get ourselves away from the screens long enough to make it.

I'm a fan of Psycho a Go-Go, and Al Adamson in general, though his films can be hit or miss at best. Psycho a Go-Go is about middleground for him, not as dreadfully incoherent as Blood of Dracula's Castle, not as existential and apocalyptic as Satan's Sadists. Yet "Psycho" can at times reach the weirdness of a David Lynch movie (Blue Velvet comes to mind), and at other times the "coolness" level of Tarantino's overrated Pulp Fiction. Here we have thin-tied gangsters in black zoot suits, dames in beehive hair with lounge voices, the catchy but surreal siren call of go-go song and dance, a chipmunk-voiced black doll, and a killer who is a cross between a young Jack Nicholson and Michael Ironside, with an ugly butch haircut and an uglier mind. The scene where he sadistically strangles a girl, intercut with the blinking neon blue lights of a seedy motel sign, is unquestionably a work of art, or at least of high imitation.

A decent genre flick without the pretensions of its later imitators, and a portal into the weird dark world of Los Angeles.

The Land of the Blind is a rather decent first movie and script, yet it has many glaring faults, the most obvious one simply being it doesn't know where it wants to go halfway through. One gets the impression that if the creator had it his way, the film would be two hours longer.

The first hour of the movie is more or less superb. Especially crafty are the news broadcasts (reminiscent of the forced lightheartedness of Japanese television) that include advertisements of products. The news segments are irreverent, silly lampoonery, and could have easily been situated in Mike Judge's Idiocracy world- yet somehow, unbelievably, the news segments and other over-the-top lampoons are never taken for being quite as idiotic as they could be, which I think is a great testament to the overall serious tone the movie holds. Like Catch-22, the more absurd moments in the first half of the movie might make us laugh, but if they do it is at our own expense.

Yet after Joe's fateful decision, and the changing of the guard, the movie diddles and pops out of cohesiveness and all but loses its footing. The difficulty the creators of this film face is fierce: how do they show things haven't changed while changing things enough so we're not bored? Their answer is a muddy montage of images that take us more out of reality and into a confusing state that lacks any emotional effect. No new insight that hasn't been told by the simplest morality Utopian tale is offered; the last quarter of the movie seems like the beginning of Papillon.

And indeed, where once the satirical elements of the first half were inspiring, now they become grating. It becomes sadly obvious that Joe and Donald Sutherland are the only characters in the film's world with any semblance of intelligence or free will; everyone else is mere blind sheep, ciphers, straw men. The serious satirical tone the film mastered in the first half fizzles into parody, a Green Acres squalor of familiar set pieces and situations. The movie's credibility is totally lost. The Land of The Blind is a satirical place, and its inhabitants aren't to be taken as anything more than straw men, but by the second half the pathos and music montages and fancy CG cuts are sprinkled a little too graciously to spice the film up, and the viewer's patience and involvement with any sort of parallel reality wears too thin.

I enjoyed the settings, and how they were filmed. All the acting was brilliant, especially Junior as the Vista Street-directing little tyrant and Donald Sutherland as the complicated revolutionary. Even Ralph Fiennes (who I've always though looks a little bit like Mrs. Doubtfire) was in top form. But I did not like the puzzlement aspect of some things. Too many puzzle and references may make the audience feel smart, but ultimately they are a magic trick, hiding the lack of original content. And ultimately there is nothing very original about Land of the Blind, and there will be little consequence to its lack of fanfare.

2001 Maniacs the remake isn't a movie. It is a post-movie. It is as developed as an 88 minute Capitol One commercial, and the only thing it sells is the theoretical algorithm of what defines a good time to a certain consumer demographic.

The overall structure, plot, pacing, dialog, and format of 2001 Maniacs could have been inputed by a machine based on the specific formulas of similar movies (Bordello of Blood, Dusk Till Dawn). 2001 Maniacs then reflects the camp aspect of slasher/gore movies, yet some integral part is missing. It isn't that 2001 Maniacs has no heart or soul, it simply wasn't programmed to have heart or soul in the first place. 2001 Maniacs follows the sad trend of most genre (and mainstream) films these days, of trying to imitate the nature of a narrative film. The structure is then reinforced through nothing but shear will of the audience, who has consumed the same tired formula so many times before they now can essentially beg for the same old bone on command.

Yet 2001 Maniacs is more than just this: it is not simply a bad movie that is neither funny or scary. It is nothing. It is a black hole, so mediocre it produces no emotions in its watcher. Or rather it produces in the watcher the vacant gaze of catatonic enjoyment one simulates when watching a commercial, this movie imitation's closest relative.

A scary thing indeed.

For the record, I'm sort of a nutjob and against all forms of atomic energy, so you'd think this movie would be right up my alley. But actually I found it quite offensive. This movie suffers from what I like to call "nowism," a distinct present-day phenomenon in which the past is viewed through current-trend glasses, and people of past eras are seen as ignorant, naive, and downright stupid. Nowists excel at taking things out of the original contexts of their times in order to do little of productive value but ridicule the past ironically for their own amusement.

I see this film, The Atomic Cafe, as one of the first and finest examples of the nowist agenda. People, especially the middle class and members of the military/industrial complex, are demonstrated (admittedly through their own film records) to be nothing but idiots, warmongers, and sadists. Is this montage of spliced news serials and army propaganda films a true representation of the people of the Atomic age? Of course not. For one thing, the powerful medium known as television was just being invented back then, and these television broadcasts, while appearing primitive and apparently buffoonish, in retrospect are demonstrations of the affects of television as a simple-minded medium. This does not mean that the people in charge of our nation, or even the common soldier or man on the street, had a mind that can best be reflected in the television broadcasts of their day, that we may watch and snicker at in our day. On the contrary, the corny dialogue must be taken with a grain of salt. People are complex creatures, and a person confronted with this new device called television, be it on the street or reading from a script, will not act as they really are. When this film lampoons the media of the past, it unintentionally lampoons the crisis of that time. This film captures the hysteria of the atomic age, yet fails to recognize the imminent and very serious threat all believed was an inevitable result of the cold war: mutual destruction. This fear may seem "funny" to us now, but at the time it was a serious matter.

Artistically, the splicing of propaganda videos and instructional tapes and news reels is handled very well, (though anyone who's had to sit through a Michael Moore documentary may groan at the ironic atomic-bomb-themed country music used as the overture). Artistically, I think this is a very capable film. It takes a great deal of talent to splice up a gigantic mass of stock photography and make a cohesive narrative out of it all. But this talent is sadly misused in creating this snickering, snide, snarky, smarmy, one-sided propaganda vehicle. A montage of fast food joints is spliced over Eisenhower giving a riveting speech about America. Mutilated Japanese victims are spliced over a voice-over of one of the A-bomb pilots. The Rosenbergs, arguably the greatest traitors of the era, are shown with unexplained yet palpable sympathy. Why? Why any of these things, except to show Eisenhower to be an idiot, a pilot to be callous, the Rosenbergs to be innocent. But why? What explanation is given for any of these arguments? Nothing but the same tricky ploys of the visual medium those old stock propaganda filmmakers thought they perfected years ago, now ironically used against them. And there can be no new criticism of The Atomic Cafe: it brings nothing new to the table. It has no new content. The old is its only content, and only to be ridiculed. Like a VH1 I LOVE THE ___ episode, it is an indestructible silent windbag, because it reflects back upon itself.

Yes, sometimes people in the past seem funny and stupid, LOL, but what can be learned by the common nowist superiority complex, demonstrated in The Atomic Cafe, that is informing the people of right now?

King of the Zombies isn't really a horror movie, it's a suspense movie, with the emphasis on that sort of dry, lukewarm-oatmeal idea of suspense supernatural tales in the 40's were often fond of. The two white protagonists often seem embarrassed of their black lead counterpart, or just don't seem to know what to do with him. Notice how they rarely look him in the eye. Although he's crucial to the plot, it often seems that he doesn't exist as anything more than a nuisance. He's like Scooby Doo trying to talk dog language to warn Velma and Freddy.

So King of the Zombies is blatantly racist, but we shouldn't hold that against it. Lots of movies back then, both good and bad, were blatantly racist. But there are plenty of other things to hate about this movie. For one thing, it doesn't know if it wants to be serious or silly. It fails at both angles because it never goes all the way. There's really not any slapstick in it, nor chills. The plot is so convoluted it practically doesn't exists (most of the film the protagonists spend awkwardly talking to the villain) and the denouncement in the last 5 seconds and hammy closing music is a big middle finger in the face of the intelligent viewer that wanted a little better explanation of what was going on. Actually now that I think about it, the whole movie really is like a Scooby Doo episode, only not as satisfying.

Watching Highlander II right after the first Highlander is a mind-altering amazing experience. I can think of only two movies off the top of my head that have sequels as radically different from their predecessors (the far less known Nemesis series and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). What Highlander II lacks in intelligence it more than makes up for in completely confusing fun.

It's just the sort of bad idea, the uber-complex nonsensical plot-hole full nonsense you dream up as a kindergärtner. It's exhilarating, exciting to see it brought to life on the screen.

Why does it take place in the future? Why is there that whole political subplot with the force field? What happened to there being only one? Who are those bald guys? What are all the other immortals doing in the past, just sitting around? If they can witness everything in the past, don't they already know the inevitable conclusion of everything? None of these questions will be answered, but a lot of fun will be had on the way.

It's always interesting to see two genres combined in an interesting way, and Highlander II takes the cake. Wheras the first movie was mostly an action movie with some fantasy elements, Highlander II uses an obvious political sci-fi setting to carry the already complicated Highlander mythos to new heights of sheer complexity. I mean, I watched the so-called "Renegade" version, which is supposed to make more sense, and I still had no idea what was going on. But if you're in the right mood after watching Highlander, and you're not some nerd fanboy of the Highlander, than watching such an unexpected sequel should be a good time. Although it's certainly formulaic, it's formulaic in ways you never even knew existed.

The Passing is a film without a plot, an experience with seemingly no end. The viewer is just as likely to be bombarded by documentary-style footage of two old men hanging around as he is to watch the grim torture of a rapist, or the psycho-tronic sounds and weird visions of medical instruments. To be honest, I really liked this movie, but I also found it pretty boring, so I would have to watch 15 minutes a day for about a week, watching it in small doses, like reading a chapter a day of a book. But I can't say I didn't find the whole experience mesmerizing. Not having any idea what this movie was about, I first thought it was going to be about demonology, or murder. The film takes its sweet time coming to any semblance of a plot, but even this aspect of the movie isn't handled in any obvious ways, but is rather interpreted by the viewer via sounds and feelings. Never is the plot really intelligible, but never is it really uninteresting either. I don't know what else to say about this movie but that the editing was excellent, the music excellent (both the contrasting 20's and 80's music samples and the scary-as-f88ck syntheziser song that drones through the whole thing) and the two old men were great actors. I really believed for the most part that they were just two old friends hanging out, and there was some documentary team following them around (and this movie was made far before the docudrama fad became cheesy). In fact, the only thing I didn't find so interesting about this movie was the plot, which seemed a little tagged on- but oh well. It's a shame that someone associated with this movie, the editor at least, didn't go on to greater recognition.

This is a great post-apocalyptic movie, better than mad max to a certain degree, and a better man's best friend movie that road warrior (remember Mad Max's dog in road warrior?). It's a little slow-paced, and some of the dark scenes are almost impossible to see, but it is a good allegory on manhood vs. domesticity- Vic is torn between his sex drive, and that sex drive leading to social commitment and thus domesticity, a struggle all men must deal with some time on a primal level, versus roaming free, aimless but with manhood intact, with his best friend Blood. Ultimetly he makes the unpredictable choice, the sort of choice only available in his environment, a lawless savage wasteland. When compared to the loveless, boring dystopia of Down Under, his choice is easy to make. Things I found very interesting in this movie: The Screamers, who are never shown, are an interesting and provocative element, giving the desert area a legendary, wild-west feel: Down Under, with its silent-movie era makeup was efficiently creepy ("The Farm" reminded me of the musical Urinetown); The ghetto silent movie porno theaters the nomads go for companionship; the fat warlord who respects Vic for having the guts to steal his food. In a lawless land, respect is the only currency worth more than material possessions. I highly recommend this movie, even if it is a little boring and dark (as in really dark, it's hard to see some scenes because they're pitched in blackness).

The Man with the Golden Arm (the movie) is a decent career vehicle for Frank Sinatra, but fails abysmally as a good adaptation of a fantastic book. You always hear about how books are "changed" when they are made into films- things are cut out, dumbed down, etc. Well, you can't even say they "changed" anything with the movie- they just told a completely different story. The characters and setting are the same sure- but not the ambiguous characterization, the depth of the men and women of Polish Chicago in the book. As for the setting, it's become merely a play stage, complete with the unnecessary "supporting role" players walking all too busilly down the claustrophobic, interior exterior streets. The movie is a dumbed-down, completely different take on Frankie Machine and drug addiction. When this happens, Zosh, Frankie, Sparrow, all lose their psychological edge. Frankie's drumming, a modest dream in the book, becomes his full passion in the movie (probably because Sinatra is a musician). And drug addiction is treated as shlock, exploitavely. The acting is decent, especially the snakelike Louie, who is more menacing in the movie than the book. But it's just a shame this kind of movie can be heralded as a classic alongside the book it is "based upon," the real story of Frankie Machine. The movie just goes to show Hollywood can' get anything right without dumbing it down and adding a happy ending. In this case, they just changed it completely, cheapening an important and realistic story into Hollywood fluff. I'm sure as hell biased because I read the book first, so I can't really treat the movie honestly by knowing how good the book is. I actually thought about turning the movie off (and I never do that), just so I wouldn't get its silly plot confused with the beauty of the book. But this is an overrated film, and while it's not so bad, the book should come first, as it was the first. And it should have remained the only story of Division Street and Frankie Machine.

A couple years ago I saw Trouble in Mind, and was immediately absorbed in the atmospheric world the film portrayed. I have since been dying to see another movie by the same director. Well, I've just seen the Moderns, and was immediately disappointed. While the film shares the same claustrophobic tendencies of the previous work, in this one it doesn't seem as deliberate, but more a matter of budgetary restraints. I never got the feeling that I was watching Paris, or 1920's Paris, for that matter. All I got was the sensation of watching stilted actors playing dress-up. The dialogue and plot for this movie is b-movie crust, which can be good, but the dreariness of the action and the way in which the film was filmed left it almost completely vacant of any charm. Cute references to pop culture from the 20's only sounds contrived and makes the film more apparent of what it isn't. One should get the feeling one is watching the 20's unfold without the crutch of references. We are never given any reason to care for any of the actors. They are cartoonish, but not cartoonish enough for them to be relieving and enjoyable. This movie takes itself far too seriously to be enjoyed as camp, which makes scenes involving fake suicide and real suicide all the more dour. The sets are perhaps more wooden than the characters, Hart's art atrocious. Hemmingway appears as a jocular Ethan Hawke ruffian, a pale shadow compared to Hart's masculinity. Lampooning famous people can be fine, but not when the only purpose of it is to rip them off and make them a clown with no real relevance to the story. I did, however, like the portrayal of Gertude Stein as a cliquish art snob. That's a more fair assessment. To be missed or slept through.

I won't even go into how funny, obnoxious, or drab this movie is (you can get all that from the title, or just the picture on the cover). I won't get into why I even watched it, because I don't know why, other than that I owned it for some reason. All I want to talk about is how amorally horrible it is. Okay, so it's bad to over-analyze dreck like this, but at least it kept me slightly ocupied while I half-hazardly watched it. "Bob" (Mark Blankfeld), channelling gene wilder), is a snide twerp who steals and blackmails, let alone harasses his assistant. The assistant (Iggy- cute, huh? Played by Leslie Jordan- avoid all movies with this whining puffball at all costs) murders people. The "sexy" dominatrix psychiatrist has random sex with a monster. The monster throws a blind girl out the window (this scene might've been funny if a better director did it, but it just comes off sort of stupidly chilling (?) to me here). These are the good guys. And the bad guys? Well, there's the evil head of the hospital, who's upset... because people are dying in his hospital. Then there's the oafish Dr. who cries because he's being framed for killing his patients. Then there's the sinister professor who wants revenge on Bob... because bob stole his experiment. Yeah, great character development, guys. Next time you make a crappy movie at least try to make the heroes likable. Oh yeah, the acting's okay.

Burgess Meredith's only attempt at film-making is a strange mesh of Eastern Philosophy and The 60's Batman show. The first thing you should know is that the narrator of this film is actually the Buddha and the premise is, more or less, the Fu Man Chu/Dr. No bad guy Mr. Go is inexplicably "enlightenened" by the Buddha's eye into becoming good. See strange psychedelic homosexual escapades with Jeff Bridges and a nauseating go-go soundtrack that will drill right into your head. All the fight scenes are right out of Batman. Good if somewhat boring movie, but you've got to love the strange premise. It's the ultimate 60's Buddhist experience.

The cover shows a dude being buried in the sand by two blonde bombshells, calling to mind happy thoughts of surf parties, beer, and topless mayhem. DON'T BE FOOLED! Turn to the back and you'll see the truth, a completely different movie with the tag line "KC's got a lot to learn about being a winner… and becoming a woman." Clearly people buying it for the front cover would Definitely NOT buy it for the plot line on the back. It's a crafty scheme to try and sell a movie that's so bland it doesn't know who its target audience is to begin with.

The movie begins with KC, a-rough-as-nails poor girl hustling a portly man at tennis, while Pat Benetar's "Hit me with your best shot" blasts in the background. Inexplicably, the music changes to an orchestral version of "America the Beautiful" when the man gets hit in the balls. You'll be hearing these and several blah soft rock songs from the 70's many times throughout this touchingly dull lifetimesque story of two girls from different ends of the track competing in a tennis tournament, along the way learning a bunch of boring junk about themselves and their mothers.

Toast of the Gods is the story of Toast, a drug dealer(?) who has complications returning to his wife Penelope when he is captured by a Cyclopian Disco Sadist. Meanwhile, Penelope is threatened by a strip club owner who wants her for his own. Toast of the Gods is a modern-day version of the Odyssey, which makes it pretty weird, though the jury's still out on whether it's good or not. It's a bit confusing, and a lot of the Odyssey themes are only there to correspond to the book, such as Toast meeting with the Blind Tersies in the Underworld- what the heck was the point of that? But the movie is visually awesome- all the scenes are interesting to look at, the photography is good, the characters are real individuals, and the soundtrack is good.

Most films lose something when they're on TV, and this one certainly does. This movie is a completely neutral, run-of-the mill cops-after-mad-bomber movie. It's forgettable for a number of reasons: the plot, the characters (who are in many movies playing the same exact characters), the situations, the usual conflict of what price for good etc. It also suffers from the same fate of Robocop II and Austin Powers II, in which the villain, Rutget Haur, is given much more screen time it seems than the hero himself. At least that's what it seemed to me, and Haur is his usual creepy evil self. All in all, a forgettable movie that for some reason I'm wasting my time reviewing.

Hollywood Zap is the story of a young southern man (nicknamed 'Downer') and his search for his missing dad. Along the way he meets Nash, a costume-wearing ex-wall street agent who now makes his living beating punks at Zaxxon, a completely random 80's video game. The two form a father-son/love-hate relationship, and along the way Downer must overcome the machinations of Porky, a sex-predator uncle, an evil slumlady, a knunchuck-wielding midget, and a bimbo out to exploit his talent. Downer's quest confronts questions of sexuality, urbanization, and whether or not one is doomed to live in the shadow of one's father. Including one of the most unpredictable twists in film history, Hollywood Zap ends like a happy Henry James novel, with Downer's real need finally quenched.

Preppies is a fun and funny sexploitation movie that looks and feels like a national lampoon's movie, i.e. Animal House. The preppies are dynamic and used for their full potential of stereotyped jokes, and the girl preppies sex-prep scene is simply hillarious. There are jokes a minute, and no borring parts to this fun film romp. It's exactly what you'd think it'd be like, and it's good! There's enough breast exposure to appease the fratboy in all of us, enough 80's dancing to appease the robot fan in all of us, an evil tommy-gun toting S&M villain, hot whores, and class conflict. The only low-note is the wannabe Cher soundtrack. Highly reccomended!