Based on the book by Tolkien, this modern classic is about Frodo Baggins, who is forced to walk all the way to Mordor, and destroy the famous ring of power so that the evil Sauron will not be able to return to power. On the way he is assisted by the Fellowship, which includes three more hobbits, a wizard, an elf, a dwarf and two warriors. But sadly the path is more dangerous than being a science teacher in a redneck state.
Wow, to remember the days when I was in the 11th grade and Fellowship film first came out. I was a big fan of the books since I was a kid so I was very excited to see it, not to mention it was being directed by Peter Jackson, one of my favorite directors thanks to sick classics like Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles and Dead Alive (goriest movie ever). So I could only get my sister to come see it with me, since nobody wanted to see a three-hour movie about elves and magic. I thought the movie was going to bomb. Boy was I wrong. Now, I know I’m going to get a lot of heat for this, but hey it’s my blog and I can voice my opinion: I only liked Lord Of The Rings. That’s right. I didn’t love it or worship it or think it was the best thing since vagina, I thought it was good. I liked it. And that’s it. I’ll mention the stuff I don’t like first.
Let’s start with Fellowship. First, I’ve never been a fan of Elijah Wood and wasn’t very excited about having him play Frodo Baggins. When I saw the film, I couldn’t see a character, I could only see the effeminate Elijan Wood making faces. I also didn’t like that every conversation between him and Sam Astin seemed to be about ‘it’s so hard to leave home and be in this shithole”. It would only get worse in the sequels. Hell I didn’t like most of the cast. The ones I did like were Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen in the roles of the wizard Saruman and Gandalf. They’re two of my favorite actors, and Christopher Lee in particular was a treat since I’m a diehard fan of his Hammer work. I also liked Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, who was really badass and good looking and had me wishing the whole movie had been about him. Sadly every other character seemed to be boring. Legolas only looked pretty and shot arrows, Gimli only complained, and worst of all was Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, in a role that never, not in the three movies, added anything to the storyline worth mentioning. And don’t think I’m being harsh just on the book, I feel the same way about her in the books. Why was she even here?
So what did I like? Well other than the three actors mentioned a lot, I actually enjoyed watching the story unfold since I was so familiar with it. I’m glad they took some stuff out of it, like the condensing of the Farmer Maggot scene, Old Man Willow, and the beloved Tom Bombadil who I never cared for myself. The action sequences are very well done, being both fantastic and realistic, and the prosthetic makeup effects looked incredible, probably the best since their heyday in the Eighties. Now, I’m not a fan of CGI in any way, but I sure as hell didn’t mind it in this film. Hell I thought for the most part it looked great. It made the landscapes look incredible and real, which mixed with the real New Zealand very well. The monsters looked good as well, except for the cave troll who looked more like a video game graphic.
The Two Towers came out the same year and my feelings were the same as this one, only I liked it even less. It seemed longer and more artificial. In the first one I felt the landscapes looked very real, but here it all looks like CGI, especially when the two hobbits are on top of Treebeard, the old, talking tree. The new characters that the movie introduced weren’t very interesting, and the final sequence, The Battle Of Helm’s Deep, seemed to go on and on and on.
I did however, love Gollum. Not only did he look as real as he possibly could (for a CGI character) but he was a very well-rounded character with a lot of interesting features. His performance by Andy Serkis was incredible, and I felt deserved an Academy Award nomination. My favorite scenes in the film involved him, but I groaned every time we cut back to the others. It just wasn’t very good.
One year later again, and out came Return of the King. I thought this movie was going to be as bad as Two Towers, but I was mistaken. I actually enjoyed Return of the King more than the other two films. It had a lot more darker elements and characters: Gollum, the Witch-King, the city of Minas Morgul, Shelob the Giant Spider, etc. Sadly a lot of what I hated came back. I’m gonna take advantage of this and give my rant about Arwen: ever since her character first appeared, I wanted her dead. And yes I’m going to jump on the bandwagon: What was with all the endings? I mean come on, I know that’s how the book goes, but just because it works on a book it doesn’t mean it works in a movie! The film should have ended when Aragorn gets crowned and takes his responsibilities as King. But then again, what do I know. As I said, I don’t hate these movies, I genuinely like them and find them very entertaining, but that’s it. I saw them again for this review for the first time since I got them on DVD in 2004 and I feel the same way about them now as I did then. These are not the greatest films ever made, but they’re still pretty good.
Michelle Boback plays Deanna, a young hot nurse who has one helluva bad day: first she gets raped on her elevator, then her house is invaded by a robber. But she’s had enough, and captures the invader with a taser gun. Soon, her live is split between having a normal life with a job and romantic life with her carpenter neighbor, to torturing the guy who broke into her home. But her mind is becoming completely unhinged, and soon she might find out that the person who attacked her might be closer than she thinks.
This was Ryan Nicholson’s first film as a director, and it shows. I’m a huge Nicholson fan thanks to films like Live Feed and Gutterballs, but this one, while as mean spirited, is nowhere near as well made. It’s amateur in many ways, especially in the sound. Sometimes the sound is so low that you can barely hear what the actors are saying. That said, the film delivers on what you might expect: gore and exploitative elements. We get some really nasty and realistic-looking body burns, some cock and ball torture (with needles!), an electric saw to the head, etc. Some very painful and realistically-made stuff. It’s not as good as his following films, but it’s still a pretty cool rape/revenge film.
I was not expecting anything from this movie, not at all. I got it because Dita Von Teese, my future wife (fingers crossed) appears in all her beautiful glory. It turns out this is actually a very well done religious horror film that has a lot to say. The acting is superb. Charles Koutris, who plays Francis, gives an intense, drugged up performance that just gets more and more psychotic as the movie goes on. In the end you feel just like him, like you’re in the worst trip of your life. Dita Von Teese is also pretty damn good, although she isn’t very good at emoting, she still gave a solid performance, and looked beautiful in the process. I also got a kick out of seeing Zalman King, famous for his famous softcore erotic series “The Red Shoe Diaries” and roles in 70’s exploitation films like Trip With The Teacher and Blue Sunshine. Here he plays a character that is so powerfully corrupt, that he has nothing to fear, not even from God. It’s his greed, evil and refusal to acknowledge his children that drives them to the lifestyles they possess. We also get small cameos from porn stars Stormy and Stephanie Swift. They always look nice.
I give a ton of props to director Ezra Gould. His directing style mixes Argento with Abel Ferrara, giving a very hallucinatory feel but also giving you the catholic guilt of a Bad Lieutenant and Ms. 45. His script is very David Lynch, where you don’t know if what’s happening is truly occurring or if they’re all hallucinations in our drugged-up friend’s mind. Mr. Gould is obviously exorcising some demons in his film, and I hope he got some sort of relief, his film came out great and I hope to see more of his work from the future.
Only the Japanese could create something that resembles Christian porn. Yes, this is a pornographic movie, and has real sex, both with humans and demons (represented by tentacle rape, or rubber hoses to be more exact). The production values are very low, shot on 80’s video and using very bad blue-screen effects for some chase sequences. The sex is great however, being very sleazy but rough, very few things fill me with pleasure, but hearing female Japanese teenagers reaching orgasm is one of them. Sadly this is a Japanese production, so all the members are pixilated. I always felt that this made the sex seem less erotic and more filthy, so it’s a plus as well.
There is a lot of cheese involved. For some reason, the filmmakers idea of being possessed by a demon is turning into a promiscuous woman and dressing like a punk rocker, while having catfights in bars. The demons look like they bought every single Halloween costume they could afford and put them on together, especially the lead with his horny helmet and Freddy Krueger plastic gloves. Satan looks like a giant star fish, as mentioned above, and has more in common with a Power Ranger villain than with anything remotely frightening. But this, along with the sleazy sex scenes, add to one entertaining piece of cartoony smut that is recommended to all.
When Seduction Cinema started their Retro-Seduction line, they began releasing many classic Joseph Sarno erotic films mixed with new productions and remakes. Roxanna, Female Animal, etc. One of those was of the British production Swedish Wildcats, here in it’s official Seduction Cinema remake. And at less than an hour, this movie will not exactly test your waters, but it isn’t exactly great cinema either. 
Fata Morgana plays Carla, an attractive reporter going to the estate of a 30’s actress (Carmen Montes) with intentions of buying the negatives and history of her films and career. But when she gets there, we see that the actress, who should be in her eighties, looks like she’s in her twenties. It turns out she is a seductive vampire, the snakewoman of the title, who soon puts Carla under a spell.
I wasn’t expecting much of this film, other than a lot of sex scenes, but I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this. It’s a remake of Franco’s own Vampyros Lesbos, sharing a lot of the same themes and characters. Soledad Miranda, in the original, played a burlesque performer who was also the vampire queen. Here the snakewoman is an actress, although Carmen Montes is a very beautiful woman, she doesn’t have the bewitching effect Soledad had. Both movies have reporters who fall under their spell, both movies have sympathetic doctors, both movies have and both movies have a sidekick named Morfo. Snakewoman has a very erotic and dreamlike quality that kept it interesting for me, and it was cool to see Lina Romay again in a movie, although thankfully she doesn’t get naked here (that shit was good in the 70’s tho). Still, the movie has one main flaw, and it’s that it lasts too long. The sex scenes are explicit, but take too much time and it’s mostly softcore. It’s not the best movie to start with if you want to get into Franco, but for Franco fans, it’s a treat.
This is one of director Lucio Fulci’s less known films, lost among his ocean of extreme gore films. It probably has something to do with the fact that the movie is basically a cash in on the sword and sandals fad that appeared in the early 80’s thanks to the success of Conan The Barbarian. It also borrows elements from Dungeons & Dragons and Quest for Fire (check out the native women’s makeup). Yes, it does feature a lot of those elements, but this movie is pretty damn good still. I would go on to say that up to now, it’s the best movie I’ve seen by Fulci on a technical level, along with The Beyond. He pulls out every cinematic trick he knows: great, contrasting lighting, cool makeup effects and pretty hilarious-but-cool-in-an-80’s-way laser animation. It also has a lot of imagination, with cool creature designs. We have werewolf soldiers that look like the first-stage transformation from the video game Altered Beast, we have rock/fish creatures, a cool golem creature, and of course, zombies. Couldn’t be a Fulci movie without zombies. There’s also a lot of explicit violence, only in a completely different context than his other gore films.
Most of the acting is forgettable, but special mention has to go to Sabrina Siani, who plays the evil Queen Ocron. She’s beautiful and is featured completely naked (except a thong) during the whole film, and wears a Destro-like mask. Last time she was nude was in D’Amato’s 2020 Texas Gladiators, but there she was just a victim. Here we get to see her play an physical, and evil role. Sadly the third act disappoints a bit, especially after all the build-up that the last hour had. The final confrontation between hero and villain leaves you wanting more, to say the least. Also, when we are finally shown Queen Ocron’s face, it’s a mayor letdown. Looks like a 50’s Halloween mask! Still, with all the faults, this movie is still pretty damn good, features gorgeous cinematography, cool action, and cool monsters. Cool movie!
Well, I beg to differ on that one. The evil Fung Cheh Wu Chi, blind master of the flying guillotine, would be my pick. Still, this is one helluva great movie, even with it’s faults. For starters, the main problem this movie has is that, at it’s core, it’s basically a Jackie Chan film wannabe. There is a lot of bad comedy moments that are in the same vein as Drunken Master, hell even our hero kind of looks like Jackie Chan. But what makes this movie kick-ass are the fight scenes. They are excellent, long and never boring, almost like watching people breakdance. The best fight is the last one, where both master and pupil fight together against the evil Ghost Face Killer. This guy is definitely one of the most interesting villains in kung fu history, beating the shit out of everyone without a drop of mercy, and later laughing about it in the most maniacal way imaginable. This last fight lasts about twenty to twenty-five minutes and it never gets dull. It’s definitely one of the best movies in the genre.
Of a curious note, The Wu-Tang Clan was very influenced by this film. They have a song called “Da Mystery Of Chessboxin” in their first album, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). One of the members is also named Ghostface Killah. Why do I say this? Cuz I love Wu-Tang, damnit.
This was one of the last Italian horror films to come out during it’s peak years, and it’s one of the least interesting. I was able to get a copy in 2007 from a Japanese DVD bootleg, and I sure felt I wasted my money. But how could I resist, a horror flick about a rat/midget killing half naked women? The cast is very much that of a b-movie: David Warbeck (The Beyond) and Janet Agren (City Of The Living Dead, Eaten Alive) are our leads, but they seem to be sleepwalking through their roles, not really giving a shit. More interesting is Eva Grimaldi, the beauty previously seen in Convent Of Sinners, and just like in that picture, here she gets naked and plays quite the sex-pot. She’s a model, but her idea of modeling is basically dancing badly like a Flashdance reject. At least she has a very nice sex scene where she shows off the goods.
But as far as acting goes, this movie belongs to the Ratman, Nelson de la Rosa. Born in the Dominican Republic, he was the shortest man to ever live. At 2 feet 4 inches, he was quite a sight. He specialized in musical comedy and was a stable for many years in Sabado Gigante. He’s most famous to western audiences as the pink-colored sidekick of Marlon Brando in The Island Of Dr. Moreau, but he will always be the Ratman to me! He sadly passed away in 2006. Rest in peace, Nelson!
One more thing that has to be said, the movie might not be one of the best, but the soundtrack by Steffano Mainetti. It’s chilling and very Euro-style. So yes, this movie isn’t exactly the best, and to be honest it has very little gore, but for it’s overall sleaze and unique villain, it’s worth a look, and it’s very entertaining, so check it out.
Wow, it seems like forever that we’ve been waiting for this movie to come out, and now that it has, I am afraid I have been left a little let down. Now, it’s not a bad movie, don’t get me wrong. The animation is top notch and the voice acting is excellent, particularly from the leads I mentioned above. Rosario Dawson in particular seems to channel her inner hoe and pulls it off excellently. I also admire the fact that this movie is so damn lewd and politically incorrect. I wish Pixar made movies with as much titties as this one! It’s too bad this wasn’t live action. Rob Zombie channels his inner geek by placing all sorts of homages to classic horror films, as it seems every classic horror character has a cameo in this thing. Even his version of Michael Myers, who gets run over by Superbeasto’s kickass car.
My only beef is that this movie is too damn short, and it left me wanting more. Also, I was a little beefed by the fact that I couldn’t see this in the theatre like it should have been released. But still even with these two main beefs, the film is pretty damn awesome, very funny, and very raunchy, and is everything that makes cinema worth giving a shit about.
Now you might think that, by the synopsis alone, this is one of the sickest movies ever made. And while yes, it is violent and sexually explicit, I’d have a hard time placing this CAT III film into that context. For you see, for all it’s explicit material, A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is, without hiding it, a comedy. We see it from the first scenes, with it’s exaggerated characters and gestures, not to mention the ridiculous overacting done by all. This is cut with all the torture footage which only adds to the bizarre nature of this film: only the Chinese could have the balls to make a movie that has such unpleasant material but make you laugh in the process. 
Now it must be said that a lot of the comedy comes from the sex scenes. First we get some Chinese s&m costumes (with bells that squeeze the breasts to the point of pain), then a man ejaculates like a hose into a gong, and to top it all off, we have a wire-fu sex sequence that must truly be seen to be believed. The first time I saw this I couldn’t believe it, and then I started wishing I could do half the stuff these people do. So yes, this movie is very graphic, but it’s a comedy, and a very good one at that.
This movie is now more famous for being one of the main influences on Raiders of the Lost Ark, which it shows proudly. Heston’s attire is nearly identical to the one worn by Indiana Jones twenty-five years later, and a lot of the plot turns, and even genuine camera shots, were utilized in Raiders and the following films, particularly in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But still, this movie doesn’t need to be compared to another for it to get the attention it deserves, as it’s a very well-made and well-acted action/adventure film that had a lot of innovative ideas at the time. Heston’s his usual tough guy mode, and seems very realistic in his greed and lust for treasure, unlike the many goody two-shoes most Hollywood movies of the time featured. His turn from greedy to good actually kind of makes sense, considering the reason which I won’t mention here, and it’s very commendable of Heston for pulling it off so naturally and realistic. I was also very happy to see Thomas Mitchell, one of my favorite character actors from the 30’s and 40’s (Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington) make an appearance as a bad guy, and he pulls it off very well. I loved his speech at the end about how age catches up with you eventually, like gravity.
There are some things I didn’t like however. For starters, Nicole Maurey is not a very good actress. Her Romanian accent sounds more like a convoluted French accent (she was a French actress) and has little interesting things to do other than being eye-candy for Heston to lust for. There is also a romantic triangle element that is introduced during the last hour of the film between Heston, Maurey, and the main archeologist that I found really interesting and compelling, I was a little sad that they didn’t develop more on it. But still, this is an excellent adventure/action film, with memorable characters. It might be over-shadowed by the movies it influenced in the future, but in my book, this is just as good.
