Planet of the Dinosaurs

A group of astronauts dressed in different multi-colored spandex jumpsuits crash-land on a strange and desolate planet. They go around and try to find something to help them survive, and soon find out that they’re not as alone as they probably hoped. Nope, there are dinosaurs all over the place, and they are all pissed off. Wow, where to start about this movie? It’s either the worst or the funniest dinosaur movie in the history of time, and that’s saying much since I like Prehisteria. Let’s start off with the script. It’s corny as hell and takes itself too seriously, not to mention it’s plagued with these long sequences where the characters start longing about returning to Earth. The acting is atrocious, and the actors look more like 70’s porn stars who wandered into the wrong movie. One of the actors is shirtless throughout, and a lot of them don’t leave much to the imagination thanks to their tight spandex suits. And the weirdest part of all? The soundtrack. It seems like it was either written and performed by some experimental prog-rock band like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or it was recorded off an old video game from a Calico computer.

But there is one mayor saving grace: the dinosaurs. They don’t show up as much as I wished, but when they do, they’re in complete stop-motion glory. It’s like a stop motion gift from the gods, thanks that they break for the monotony of the ‘heroes’ talking bullshit and walking around aimlessly. We get stegosaurs, that triceratops with only one horn, I dunno it’s name, dilophosaurus and of course, the mighty T-Rex. These animals kill our heroes and every time it happens, it’s hilarious. So yes, this movie really sucks, but it’s pretty hilarious in how much it sucks and it does feature cool dinosaur effects. Recommended with a bunch of friends and a hell of a lot of beer.

The Planet Of The Dinosaurs Drinking Game! Take a shot when:
-the group walks around aimlessly
-A dinosaur shows up
-A dinosaur eats someone
-the characters are building thankless chores
-the shirtless guy flexes

The Little Shop Of Horrors

Seymour is a geeky loser who works for a flower shop named Mushnik’s Shop, where he pines away hoping to fall in love with the girl of her dreams, Audrey. His dream includes creating a new kind of plant, a plant that can not only talk, but has a big taste for human flesh and blood. Soon Seymour sees himself selling his soul and committing crimes for the devil plant. Will he be able to destroy the creature, or will it destroy him first?
It’s a little sad that this movie has now been almost completely overshadowed by it’s 80’s musical comedy, which is now as big a part of the culture as Ghostbusters or other mayor 80’s films. But in all it’s defense, this movie is a very good comedy film, even if it is low budget. The actors are all great. Jonathan Haze is great as the geeky Seymour and Jackie Joseph (who was later in Gremlins) is very pretty and is less annoying than the actress that appeared in the musical remake. I also prefer the actor who played Mushnik, Mel Welles, just because he looks like every time he talks, he looks like he’s about to have a heart attack. We also get a lot of good cameos, the most memorable of course is Jack Nicholson as a masochistic client in the dentist’s office, who really loves getting dental torture. His character would later appear in the guise of Bill Murray in the remake. This one also has a very funny cameo by Dick Miller, who is a Corman and Joe Dante regular, as a guy who eats flowers.
Roger Corman once boasted that he was able to make this movie in three days. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it shows on something, it’s on the plant itself, the gigantic Audrey II. Because of the budget, the creature is definitely a letdown. It doesn’t have any of the personality or evil attitude of the creature in the 80’s remake, but it’s forgivable because of it being a different time and, to be honest, an independent production. The script is still solid as hell, it’s simply very funny, has great acting, and has a pretty good Dragnet parody (and I love me some Dragnet). This movie comes very well recommended, especially if you’ve only seen the remake.

Rad

The eighties were a time where you could make a family movie out of everything, and bike riding definitely became a part of it. Our story involves a local bike-riding high school student named Cru, who can’t seem to go down the street without doing crazy bike stunts. When a bike-riding competition gets to his town, he decides that he has to be a part of it. But it’s not going to be that easy, since the competition features some of the most talented riders from across the country, not to mention that the owners of the Mongoose bike company want their guy to win, no matter what the cost. You know this movie is going to be a ball full of cheese the moment frame one starts, with it’s cheesy soft 80’s music playing to kids doing tricks on bikes in slow motion. It’s all cheese here when it comes to the music. The best sequence to prove this is the one in the high school gym, where Cru and his new girlfriend (played by Full House’s Lori Loughlin) have a ‘bike-off’ to the tunes of Send Me An Angel by Real Life. Speaking of this scene, it’s amazing how they try to pull off the ‘where’s the stuntman’ routine. I mean, Lori Loughlin doesn’t look like she can ride a bike with training wheels, let alone do stunts on them. The other most cheesetastic moment is the ‘love montage’ where they go down a waterslide. Hilarious!

Surprisingly enough, the movie has a pretty solid cast. We get solid performances by veteran actors like Ray Walston (Fast Times At Ridgemont High) and Jack Weston (The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street), but more surprisingly, Talia Shire. Yes, THAT Talia Shire, from The Godfather and Rocky franchises. Her role is small, but they still manage to give her the worst lines (“You defied me!”), even if she’s still able to deliver them with some kind of dignity. Yes, this is your typical, clichéd 80’s drama/family film, but still, there’s a certain appeal. It’s just really fun, something that a lot of movies today just don’t have, and it’s very entertaining. I suggest you give it a try if you haven’t, or haven’t seen it in a long time, since it hasn’t been out on DVD yet. You won’t regret it.

Nightmares

In the early 80’s, slashers were everything, and they came from all over the place. Australia was no exception, as legendary exploitation filmmaker John Lamond showed us in this 1980 production. The story involves a young actress named Helen (Jenny Neumann), who saw her mother die in a car accident, along with her mother’s lover. She has become an actress and has landed a role in an Oscar Wilde-style comedy. But soon, everyone in the set is starting to die in very violent and gratuitous ways, and Helen may, or may not be, the killer. But if it isn’t her, who could it be? Someone from the past? A disgruntled PA?

Yeah that joke was stupid, but so is this movie. This is possibly the least interesting slasher I have seen, even worse than Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. Now, let me first say that there are two things that are really good about this. For starters, all the murders start with glass being broken, and all the murders are committed with a broken piece of glass. This is pretty cool and an original addition to the “trademark murder weapon” tradition of slasher films. And the murders themselves are pretty damn fucked up, with some of the most painful-looking stabbings I’ve seen in the movies. The mixture of the gore and the sound effect used really makes me feel the skin rip. And second, there is a lot of explicit nudity involved with these murders. Yes, we get two full nude scenes, and one of them is surprisingly explicit, even for a slasher film. The second one looks especially painful, however, since the woman gets herself a slash in her buttcheek. Ouch.
Even with all of this going on, however, the movie cannot be saved. The script is atrocious beyond belief and the acting for the most part is atrocious. There just isn’t enough character development in the script for me to care about anyone in the script, so the movie gets boring pretty quick, with the exception of the murder sequences. Also, is it just me, or do the scenes of the play just show what could be the worst stage play in the history of mankind? Really disturbing, in a bad way. However, I will say that if you like slashers like I do, you should hunt this film down, as it has a ton of great murders and pretty good nudity/sex. Just don’t hope for much else.

Nightmare Sisters

This is one of the most that epitomizes the insane popularity of the scream queen during the 1980’s. There is no doubt, back in the day you could sell a horror movie just on their name being on the credits. This film features three of the biggest in the scene: Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens, as three nerdy girls who are giddy about having a get together with three fellow male nerds. The thought that these three beautiful babes would have problems getting dates is kind of a joke, but this is a comedy. Because of a crystal ball that Brinke Stevens buys, the three girls get possessed and turn into mega-hot-babes, possessed by a succubus. The three possessed women eat the geek’s fraternity jock brothers, then go after the geeks. The geeks decide to call an exorcist to fight the succubus and free the girls so that they can get laid.

I knew I wasn’t gonna love this movie from the moment I saw the first scene, with a bad comedian doing a bad Indian accent. But soon after the film got rolling with it’s three leads, I realized that this isn’t really the kind of movie that I should take seriously. It’s a comedy, and a goofy one at that. The film I can compare this to the most is another DeCoteau film, Sorority Babes In The Slime Ball Bowl-O-Rama. It’s stupid, but it’s entertainingly stupid.
But let’s face it, as bad as the script is and as unfunny and stupid the comedy is, it’s all saved thanks to our three leads. The three women are beautiful as ever, and they have great comedic timing and chemistry together. There are many long takes in the film, and the first noticeable one is the one the three share as their ‘geek mode’ after Stevens brings a box of stuff she bought at a thrift store. You see that scene and it’s one long take of the three women talking, and they are really fun and don’t make it boring at all. They also share a bathtub scene, which is really interesting because of the chemistry together. These women look like they’ve had sex with each other in real life! I know, I’m a pervert, but the point is, these three women are great actresses that got stuck on a niche, which is kind of sad but hey, at the same time, they had a career and in a world like the one we live in, it’s hard to have a career in anything, particularly in a career that is so fun and beloved. But this film isn’t really recommended, unless you just want to see these three great women. Other than that, stick with Sorority Babes.

Night Call Nurses

This is a very simple film, as it’s basically a day-to-day account on the lives of three nurses, told in an exploitation way. These three nurses are the mentally-unstable Barbara (Patty Byrne), the sexpot Janis (Alana Stewart) and the black political revolutionary Sandra (Mittie Lawrence). All this in the change of the 60’s, as Barbara has to deal with trying to fall in love with her hippie psychiatrist and not fall victim to a stalking nurse, while Janis falls in love with a trucker addicted to speed and Sandra is trying to sneak out a black revolutionary from the hospital she works in.

This movie starts off promisingly enough, with a naked woman throwing herself off a window. Instead of her body falling to the ground, a doll does, breaking into pieces on the ground. From that opening sequence, I thought I was about to watch a long-lost giallo or something, But nope, this is basically just an exploitation film, and not a very good one at that. Not that it’s not entertaining, mind you, but it’s just has so many faults that it’s kind of hard to take it seriously. For starters, the movie is dated as hell. Just like Rebel Without A Cause and Easy Rider, this is a product of it’s time. The problem is that this movie is nowhere near as good as those previously mentioned. This comes to a particular light during the ‘group therapy’ session Barbara attends, where the psychologist asks the group to strip off of their clothes so that they can feel what real freedom is like. In our ridiculously PC world, where people will sue you for sneezing on their shoes, I couldn’t imagine something like that passing. I can’t get women naked to work in my movies, I can’t imagine something like it in group therapy.

This particularly bad storyline goes into even crazier territory as it’s revealed that the stalker nurse is *SPOILER* a transvestite! The transvestite attacks the doctor and Barbara, and then Barbara convinces the transvestite to help save the doctor’s life… AND THAT’S ALL THAT THEY MENTION ABOUT IT! For no reason they just forget about this particular plot and move on to the most entertaining part of the whole movie, a sequence where Sandra and Janis bond together and rescue the political revolutionary in the hospital. This rescue leads to one of the most ludicrous car chases ever, with some of the worst continuity I’ve ever seen in my life. It goes from day on the exteriors of the truck to night on the interior shots of the truck. And even more ludicrous, they get chased by cops. One of the black dudes throws a bunch of dinamite stuck together, enough to blow up a house, and it explodes under the car. The explosion only causes the front of the car to blow smoke and the cop to come out in black and give the finger. I guess I would expect the guy to get turned into KFC, but I guess I was wrong.

Wow I’ve written a lot, considering this movie clocks under 80 minutes, with one of the cheesiest happy endings ever. Like I said, the transvestite subplot does not get resolved, and when they finish rescuing the revolutionary, it just goes into a montage of the three nurses posing happily. What the hell? Did they just give up and decided to take Polaroids? So yeah this movie is bullshit, but it is entertaining, and I can’t think of any single moment where I was bored. So watch it if you want to watch an average exploitation movie, just don’t expect high art.

Over The Top

What do you get when you remake Rocky, only this time with a child custody plot replacing the “I love Adrian” plot and arm-wrestling instead of boxing? Well, you get Over The Top, the classic Cannon action flick from the 80’s starring that icon of muscle and curved lips, Sylvester Stallone. Stallone plays Hawk (or Hawks, depending on who’s calling his name), a trucker who has just agreed to take care of his spoiled, homosexual son, Michael (David Mendenhall). Not everybody is happy about that, particularly the kid’s grandfather, Jason Cutler (the well-tanned Robert Loggia). Meanwhile, Hawk has to worry about an arm-wrestling competition in Las Vegas where he’ll get the chance to win a brand new truck. Oh, the drama! I never understood why so many people consider this film to be cheesy. Well, I do actually, but I blame it mostly on two things: first, the music. It’s fucking terrible, as bad as 80’s music gets. Particularly bad is the Kenny Loggins song, which is played not once, but twice, almost in it’s entirety. Makes me feel like I’m digging shards of metal into my nails. Anyway enough about the music, the other thing that makes this movie cheesy as fuck is the kid character, Michael. I know he’s supposed to be spoiled, but I’ve never seen such a whiny, unlikeable child in my life. Well, the only one I can think of that’s just as bad is the one in Phantasm III, but yeah he’s pretty bad. I particularly hate the scene where he’s looking at his father’s sent papers and has that awkward smile… just weird. He shares no chemistry with Stallone, and most of their scenes come of awkward as hell. I’m not surprised the kid ended up doing “Going Bananas” with Dom DeLuise.
Even with these two negative factors, I really love this movie. I’ve loved it since I was a kid. I can’t think of any other movie that signifies what people call “guy flicks”, well this and Road House, but I actually know women who like Road House. I’ve never met a woman that likes Over The Top, and it doesn’t surprise me. It has no interest in being sympathetic toward women, it’s just a flick about guys getting together and sweating until they have nuclear armpits.Stallone is great. He plays the Rocky type yet again, being a sensitive good guy, but his best moments come when he decides to arm wrestle, when he turns his hat around and makes his crazy, pumped face. He’s either crazy or he’s constipated, I’m not too sure. The final half hour, where Stallone participates in the arm-wrestling contest, is fantastic. The dudes in this thing are incredible, they look like Hulk Hogan’s inbred backwoods brothers. And the main antagonist of the match, Bull, is a beast. He looks like he’s the size of a house and his muscles are as big as my torso. He was played by Rick Zumwalt, who would later play the tattooed strongman in Batman Returns. He blows up in that one, sadly. This movie is simply badass, and even though it has it’s flaws, it’s incredibly entertaining and Stallone is great in it. I’ve watched it like fifteen times, and I’ll watch it fifteen more in the future.

Next Of Kin

In this Australian thriller, Jacki Kerin plays Linda, a woman in her late 20’s who has just inherited an old folk’s home that used to belong to her mother. From the moment she gets there, weird stuff starts happening. from an old person who dies, to visions of herself when she was younger playing with a red ball. Soon enough she discovers there’s something evil with the house, and the more she reads into it, the weirder things get around the house. Soon she discovers that someone from her past is living there with them, someone who wasn’t very right in the head, so meone who could be family. I was very surprised by this film. Most Australian genre films are really out there, full of gore and exploitative elements. But this one is surprisingly restrained, more interested in creating suspense and terror than going for the gross-out. The acting is excellent, particularly from the lead, Jacki Kerin, who is very sympathetic and real-looking. Her face is the face of someone who’s lived, and that adds to her character, particularly during the third act where things get very hectic. We also get a good performance from John Jarratt as the young lead. You might recognize him from other horror films like Wolf Creek, and the two Australian giant croc movies, Rogue and Dark Age. The movie reminds me a lot of The Shining, the book not the movie, in that there are a lot of whacked out things that you don’t know if it’s really happening or not. Scratch that, I actually prefer this movie more than the Shining, which I’ve always considered an over-rated piece of tripe. There are two great sequences that will stick with my mind forever though: the sequence where our heroine stabs the villain in the eye through the door and has the most dramatic run-down-the-hallway scene in the history of cinema. The second scene I will always remember is the fountain of blood that reveals a dead body in the water. These two sequences are terrifying but beautiful to look at the same time. The ending has been written about in many other blogs and even in the great Ozploitation documentary that came out in 2008, and with good reason. It’s an explosion that’s only seen from halfway through, as the first part is seen only in the glow of a sign. It’s been revealed that it was an error, but every filmmaker knows that errors can be the friend of the director. This is a great thriller from the land down under that is just begging to be rediscovered by horror audiences. Comes highly recommended.

Crossroads

This movie is more boring than church

Monster Of Frankenstein

I have to admit that I don’t watch as much anime as I probably should, but I blame it on an ex-girlfriend who used to drive me insane with crap like Ranma, Naruto and Hellsing. I got to the point where I couldn’t stand to watch Japanese animation. Still, there is some of that stuff that I enjoy, particularly the works of Hayao Miyazaki, and individual films like Akira and Perfect Blue. Hell, a few months ago I gave a review to an anime adaptation of Marvel’s Tomb Of Dracula that was pretty damn cool. I also like the Vampire Hunter D stuff, and when I found out that there had been a Frankenstein adaptation in anime form, I hunted it down as quickly as I could. What I got was this, a very disappointing movie that nevertheless has things to recommend about it. For starters, the story. It’s nothing new here, with the doctor Victor Frankenstein creating a monster that craves vengeance against his creator. We get very familiar elements, such as the blind man that is in most incarnations, the little girl, similar from Ghost Of Frankenstein, and the creature looks like the Karloff monster on steroids. Seriously this damn monster is almost fifteen feet tall! And like the Universal films, it’s the monster that’s the center of the story. Of all the characters in the anime, his is the only one that goes through a change, first starting as a bloodthirsty killing machine, and slowly becoming more and more friendly when he finds the little girl. It’s a nice twist on the story, since normally he’s either a monster or a creature of sympathy, but never really both. The animation style is very similar to Vampire Hunter D, with some very realistic artwork and backgrounds. Sadly that’s all that I can recommend about this particular film. The thing that hurts this movie the most is it’s pacing. We start off great, with a very original and well-done ‘birthing’ sequence for the monster, but when the plot kicks in the story drags to the pace of a snail. It gets especially slow when the monster starts getting civilized. By the third act we get a cool action sequence involving a forest fire, but by then the main focus of the story seems to go apeshit. Seeing the doctor on the shoulder of the monster screaming it to hurry up reminded me more of Gigantor than any Frankenstein story. The voice acting is pretty bad too, but you can already expect that from 80’s anime. In total, this is an interesting new take on the Frankenstein story, and I’m sure a lot of people will get a kick out of it, but I’m not one of them.

Maniac 1934

Have you ever seen a film where, halfway through, you start questioning reality and wonder what the fuck are you on? I know a lot of people who suffer from these experiences while watching the films of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowski. Me? I have only suffered it from this 1934 production, made by the first king of exploitation, Dwain Esper, who gave us such high art as Reefer Madness and How To Dress In Front Of Your Husband. Based somewhat on Poe, the story deals with an actor who assists a mad scientist who is able to reanimate bodies ala Herbert West. The assistant kills the doctor and decides to put on a costume to make people think he is the doctor, and so he continues doing wacky experiments. Some of these include shooting up with adrenaline a guy who thinks he’s the orangutan from Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue (I’m dead serious) and then trying to hit it up with a chubby golddigger. Oh, and he’s afraid of cats. Like I said before, this is somewhat based on Poe, mostly The Black Cat, in the fact that the character is afraid of cats and walls up the doctor the way the guy does in the story. That’s as far as it goes I’m afraid, as this is as faithful to Poe as the Karloff/Lugosi Black Cat… actually if I think about it, this is more faithful. But that doesn’t mean it’s better, oh no. By all means this movie should be a forgotten piece of shit. It has some of the worst technical aspects I have seen from a 1930’s movie, and I know about bad filmmaker, being a bad filmmaker myself. The acting is also terrible, going to ridiculous lenghts to over-act and make the story as unbearable as possible. Add to that these weird title cards that pop up every fifteen minutes explaining to us different psychological disturbances and you feel like you’ve stumbled into the Twilight Zone or something. And that’s exactly what makes this film so memorable. It’s so weird, so surreal, that you just have to sit there, in awe, wondering what the fuck you are watching. Am I watching a real movie? Am I watching some sort of abstract play performed by members of an insane asylum? The movie also breaks some ground in that it features some light gore, but more than you could see in the 30’s, from a cat eating a heart to the mad scientist swallowing the cat’s eyeball. We also get some nudity, mostly pointless and ridiculous, but it’s also shocking just because I couldn’t even think of there being tits in the 30’s, except for those bad nudist shorts I previously reviewed (look for those, they’re fun). My favorite scene, however, must be the one with the chubby women in their ill-fitting underwear talking bullshit. One of them has the voice of Minnie Mouse and the other dances to no music. I wish all cinema was this insane.

Death Ship

A group of people survive a horrible sinking at sea, only to be rescued by the film’s title, the Death Ship, a haunted SS ship that causes people to go insane and starts killing them one by one in different, violent ways. Yes, this is the basic plot of the Death Ship, a Canadian/French production. The plot, as you can tell, is no different from your typical haunted house film, although I must admit that the movie benefits from it’s creepy location. The ship where the film takes place does look like an empty shithole, and is very similar to the space ship in Alien, at least in the areas below. The other memorable aspect of this film is the acting. When I put it on I had no idea that the film was filled with known and talented actors, and I was glad to see them. The stand-out is George Kennedy, famous for playing Captain Ed in the Naked Gun films. Here, he plays a bitter sea captain who later gets possessed by the evil ghosts of the old Nazi captain. He’s an asshole when he’s normal but he turns really vicious when he gets possessed. We also get Richard Crenna from the Rambo films playing a good guy, and that’s always good. Then there’s the obligatory t&a, given to us by British actress, Victoria Burgoine. She is really good-looking and has the greatest nude/death scene I’ve seen in a long time: she drowns in a shower full of blood! If you know me, you know I’ve got a thing for naked women covered in blood, so this made me very happy. And when George Kennedy throws her over, she looks great dead. As for the death scenes, they’re hit and miss. The sequence with the shower full of fake blood is by far the best, but there are some other interesting ones. One of the sailors gets himself thrown into a net full of fish, and another is picked up by a hook then thrown overboard until he drowns. As you see, they’re not very memorable. George Kennedy has a cool death scene, however, but I don’t want to reveal too much about it. Let’s just say he loses one of his limbs in a very, very painful way. In closing, this is a very accomplished and well-made ghost story, very typical of it’s time but entertaining as well. I recommend it.