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Vidocq (2001)
The Matrix in 1789
I started this once and stopped because, for god's sake, how much green screen can one person take? It came around again and soldiered on this time and...for god's sake, how much green screen can one person take? The whole conceit of trying to make the French Revolution look sexxxxxxy is ridiculous. The plot, which I didn't understand has a hole as big as Depardieu's nose: Did they really have the technology for unbreakable mirrors in the 1870s? Yes, I know it's fantasy but everything on the screen screamed "2000AD steampunk" rather than "period costume". Almost every single effect served not to enhance the plot but to make you stop thinking about it. "Is that street real or CGI?" You don't want your audience asking this question or at least *I* don't want to ask this question.
The plot? Um..a journalist is looking for...some guy. A whole bunch of special effects happen. There's some pretty people. Some ugly people. A little nudity. A big fight at the end and who really knows what happens or why.
It's probably a great movie to get baked and watch but, sadly, I don't smoke weed anymore.
Scream Queens' Naked Christmas (1996)
Crappy Music and Sixes
Do you like hearing extended version of original xmas, played with a lot of reverb and then restarted kind of at random? BINGO! You've found your movie! Do you like women who are *almost* hot! You've got 'em! Do you like body paint doubling as blood? OOOH! You win! Fake breasts? CHECK! Some kind of a Kurt Cobain look-alike who pops in sometimes to say great things like "Oooooh! That Susan! I wish I had a chance to kill her!" AND, as a bonus, it's filmed in a basement! Got a boner, yet? Neither do I.
Centerfolds from Hell (1992)
Canadian Crap
What happens when you get a bunch of Canadian sixes and try to make some kind of polemic about sexism? This. This right here.
Donny is a douchebag photographer who's only in it for the poontang. Boy, is he a bad guy! He JUST USES WOMEN! He bangs women behind his girlfriend's back. He makes her do his laundry and do all the shopping. One night during dinner with friends, he tries to hit on his best friend's girlfriend. Donny's girlfriend catches him and everyone tells him he's a jerk and leaves. So he gets drunk, make unsuccessful booty calls and needs to throw up. So he goes to the bathroom and...FALLS INTO SOME KIND OF TIME HOLE. Or something. Either way, he falls into the lair of some society of feminists. What follows is A Christmas Carol where Donny's shown the error of his ways. We're subjected to vignettes of Donny being a dick with women, how he's screwed their lives up and a whole lot of really badly written faux-feminist crap that sounds like it was written by a guy because it was.
Joel Olson's one gear consists of smirking. He can't even lie convincingly. He just smirks. "I'm sorry," he smirks. "I love you," he smirks. "Don't kill me," he smirks. Dominique St. Croix does a passable job as the dominatrix...er...queen of the feminists but that's not saying a lot given that she gets to say things like "you just throw women away like trash."
Throughout the whole mess, you get the feeling that film actually believes that they've come up with something new. It's only listed as sci-fi because the society wears belted lavender tights conducive to camel toe.
If you want to know how not to write dialog, this is your movie.
Making Waves (2004)
Couldn't Finish It
If you want to listen to white guys whine about their rights getting taken away, this movie is for you. I turned it off when the fat Santa Claus guy started talking about dumping his cable access show for Pirate Radio when he found out about the Sovereign Citizen movement. That's right. Doing cable TV was a sellout, man. REAL patriots actively work against the corrupt gov't that...allows morans to act against it rather than jail them.
Anywho - I was hoping for a lot more variance and creativity than this provided. I've listened to a bunch of actual pirate radio like Commander Bunny and The Bowling League but those guys are real pirates, operating on shortwave. The "pirates" in this documentary broadcast on FM working through a loophole. The documentary didn't even really get that technical.
Bottom line. If you hate the gov't that builds in protections for you to hate the gov't, then this is your documentary. Also, move to another country and tell me how repressive America is.
Comrade Detective (2017)
Too Competent
It's so close. The biggest issue is that it looks too good. Part of the joke is that Communism is better than Capitalism...but not really. Instead, we get a glossy, overproduced product that couldn't possibly be what it pretends to be. There's far too much of the West in this show to establish the verisimilitude and that is the entire genius behind Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Darkplace showed a horrible show produced by incompetent people and it kept up that fiction. Comrade Detective only gets half of the joke. Gorgeous cinematography, sweeping camera pans with nary a trace of the grit of the "source material." If you've ever seen any Eastern European from that time period then you know it doesn't look good. Even under the rubric of "restoration" it falls apart pretty quickly.
The other issue is they couldn't decide whether it's a comedy or an homage to bad TV. There's not enough jokes to be rollickingly funny and the plot is too believable to really sustain jokes. The stuff with chess is great but they should have hit it harder. The profanity seems really out of place to pass it off as an actual TV show. Perhaps that wasn't their vision and this was the product they wanted to produce. However, just throwing a few communist phrases out in the middle of police drama doesn't create a world. It just points out that they didn't fully think the project through.
Still, it's a good effort.
Among Friends (2012)
Fantasy Sequence, Jules
I haven't read the rest of the reviews but how does this rate 4.5?
As one reviewer said, it's The Breakfast Club in the House of 1000 Corpses...and I'd add Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean.
Bernadette, a lovely psychotic psychologist, plans a party murder mystery party for her friends...and then drugs them so they can't move. From there, she exposes their lies and hypocrisies. Sure, the fact that she's engaged in deception to know all that she knows and has her own hypocrisies doesn't make sense...that's why she's psychotic. In the course of the night, she shows the hidden videos of the "friends" cheating on each other, raping each other and spying on each other, while keeping their secrets. Throw in some mushrooms and general trippiness and what's not to like?
The rock solid script takes you through the various sins with some excellent group dynamics and ensemble acting. Towards the end, Jules (the blond bombshell who's tripping) goes into a full blown hallucination which throws out an even more unsettling vibe with a gasp-inducing consequence.
Everyone is spot on in their roles. Bernadette plays her insanity with a subtleness and restraint that could have thrown the movie off the rails. This provides the perfect contrast in the rare moments when she does flip out. Jules, too, shines in her role and brings depth to her party-girl persona. When I first saw her, I thought she was too pretty bring off the role but she fearlessly takes on the drug trip aspect and sells it brilliantly.
All in all, it starts up quick and maintains its pace providing an amazing ride!
Calling Hedy Lamarr (2004)
Self Indulgent Crap By Son Who Sells Phones
I couldn't finish this. I struggled through 3/4s and then came a sequence of fast cutting between actresses saying "*I* am Hedy Lamarr!", "I AM Hedy Lamarr!" "I am HEDY Lamarr" for what seemed like two minutes. Then I turned it off.
I get that you want to play around with the documentary format. You want to create something different and new. Good for you. That's admirable. But when the vast majority of your movie is people talking on the phone and you're not sure who their talking to the effect is that you're stacking the deck and creating a narrative that didn't happen. It feels fake. It comes off like the records in the 50's and 70's where someone would ask a question and the response would be a line from a popular song.
But it doesn't stop there.
The focus doesn't seem to be on Lamarr but on her son, the filmmaker. "I wanted to be an actor but I couldn't make it pay." So...you decided to make money in another field and then make some weird, incestuous film about your mom? You film yourself talking about how you want your movie to look...after you've played the sequence you've already made?
What was the point of filming auditions for the role of your mother when most of them shouldn't have been there? There's one sequence where he's talking to an actress portraying an older version of his mom...and he's having a conversation with her as if she's actually his mom. You can do a lot of therapy that's more productive and cost effective than making a movie about how mommy didn't love you.
Worst of all, he just throws all of the information out there and does nothing to sort it all out. Apparently, he interviewed people who knew her rather who tell radically different stories about who she was. No matter how horrible a mother she was, he should be able to bring some kind of perspective to these differing opinions but instead he just lets them talk...on the phone...maybe to each other...or maybe he's on the other side of the phone. We don't know. We know there's a camera crew filming them but we have no idea where he, as the filmmaker is. There are awkward passages of him talking on the phone, obviously trying to act. "Yes. Mr. Spielberg?" No. You didn't get that call through.
This is a desperate and desperately sad movie starring (and I mean starring) an unloved son who's trying to compete with his mom.
Gothic Vampires from Hell (2007)
Kind of an Apt Title
There's a lot of goth. There's vampires. And it's hell.
If you like blurry video of chunky goth chicks dancing in a half empty club, you're in luck. There's a lot of that, too. Plus lots and lots and lots of video special effects that are supposed to...I'm not sure why they're there. Is it an homage to cable access shows? Possibly. It doesn't make sense any other way.
Ostensibly, it's about an up and coming goth band on the verge of success. An A&R chick shows up just in time for the battle of the goth bands of which there only seem to be two. And the A&R chick kills off one of them. Don't worry - i I won't post spoilers because I'm not sure I'll finish it.
Why are there CGI segments? I don't know. Do I want to watch a fat chick masturbate for a hot chick? Not really.
Does this review make any sense? Nope. Nor does the movie. But it's nice to see the hoses the gallons of fake blood come out of.
Goats.
Save yourself some time and watch something else.
Murder-Set-Pieces (2004)
3/8ths OK
As with most, I'd heard about this movie and finally had the time to watch it. In the end, I found it to be a gratuitous, pretentious pile of crap that had the potential to work but Palumbo got lazy and didn't keep a consistent thread...outside of nudity, gore and pointless shock.
Case in point: If you're opening with 9/11, make the goddamn film relevant to 9/11. I saw literally no reason for the footage to be in there outside of "oooooh, I'm being edgy!" Did 9/11 spark this rampage? Obviously not. The Photographer was a psychopath well before that. Is Palumbo trying to tie the carnage on screen to 9/11? Nope. Is Palumbo trying to say that no Jews died during 9/11 and make a Nazi tie-in that way? Nope. So, why use it? Oh. Right. Marketing.
The Nazi tie-in was interesting. I was hoping to see more of how this was an influence. That would have been more interesting than the final product. Maybe it was in German. But I don't speak German. So I'll never know. As it stands, it just kind of fades in and out. The Nazi guy just kind of shows up and...goes away. There's no sense of who The Photographer is outside of a psychopath.
There's literally no real human relation in this movie outside of the woman and her sister and that's pretty thin, too. What happened to the parents? No idea. Anyway, women are just props for Palumbo to kill and men are just the vehicles to kill them with. That's basically it for characters.
It started promisingly but devolved pretty quickly. The turning point for me came with The Photographer starts spouting misogynistic crap to the girl in front of her sister and the sister doesn't even react. Worse, she doesn't even seem to have noticed, since she yells at the girl when she calls The Photographer creepy. There's some good drama there but it gets in the way of slaughtering women so...why bother with it?
I read in his bio that Palumbo was raised by his dad. He said something to the effect of "if you want to know about my childhood, watch Kramer v Kramer." Which about says it all. MSP is basically a mommy-issue movie.
Nazithon: Decadence and Destruction (2013)
Trailers and Less
I was kind of excited to see a docu about Nazisploitation which is what this sounded like. I'm kind of surprised there's not a serious movie about it (or at least I haven't found one). Oddly, a lot of the atrocities in these and The Men Behind The Sun series are historically accurate. This gives them a whole new level of meaning and relevance beyond the T&A and torture.
How annoying to find out that 1. It's just a bunch of trailers and scenes strung together. 2. There aren't enough movies to fill the allotted time without going into other genres. 3. Michelle McGee is the poster girl for Quaaludes.
Seriously, the connecting material is horribly written ("i love a man in uniform") and incompetently performed. I wrote the quotes in lower case because that's how it's delivered. Some face-tattooed bimbo with fake cleavage and an inability to sustain, let alone DO, a German accent just doesn't help.
The whole thing maybe cost $3000 and it shows in the format 1. Bimbo decides whether she'll try the accent. 2. She monotones the script 3. A graphic comes up with metal door slamming FX Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Save your time. Save your money. Save your ratio. Don't bother.
Wrestling for Jesus: The Tale of T-Money (2011)
But What Actually Happened?
Midway through, a former WFJ wrestler says he left because he felt like Tim was hiding all of the bad things that were going on in his life outside WFJ. What were those bad things? You won't find out here. Tim is still as closed off about "bad things" as he was previously. Yes, his father killed himself (in a throwaway line he says he did it in front of the family) but how did he kill himself? We don't know and the filmmaker never bothers to ask. Tim talk about how he used WFJ to not think about his dad's suicide. Apparently, he's still not thinking about it because we're giving no clues at all to why it happened. His wife has him arrested for domestic assault because they had an argument. What was the argument about? Who knows. They'd been having trouble since his dad's suicide. What was the trouble? Dunno. They do wind up getting divorced, though.
The sequences of the wrestling prove to be surreal and, as I'm an atheist, laughable. Tim passive-aggressively bullies the audience up for an altar call telling them "in other parts of the world, people would be running up here...but don't do it to impress me." Missed opportunities abound such as the guy who started off with WFJ wearing an upside down cross on his forehead (because he was evil) to be vilified for wearing an X on his forehead after moving to a secular outfit.
Most importantly, after WFJ breaks up, Jesus drops out of the picture for the most part. Tim lives "in sin" with his new girlfriend and apparently grace no longer needs to be said before dinner. Tim goes on to start a secular wrestling organization. This bombshell is dropped in the epilogue.
There's a great story buried underneath all of the opaqueness. Whether the filmmaker was lazy or the subject refused to actually address his life remains to be seen. The build up is compelling, dropping bits and piece as it continues, but in the end, it's a tease and frustratingly shallow.
My criteria for a documentary is that it shows me a part of life I didn't know about. This did that but it left out some of the most interesting parts.
I frati rossi (1988)
Great To Unload The Dishwasher To
At first, I thought this was a TV effort, given the dull, flat, boring look of it all. Everything is off on it. Given that it was probably shot on video, everything is far too bright to bring out any kind of atmosphere. Plot-wise, it's ridiculous. The basis for the marriage between two vacant people hinges on her falling out of a tree because...of a tarantula...that we only see one more time. Honestly - she falls out of the tree and they cut right to the wedding. The movie plods along with cliché after cliché that they can't even be bothered to do properly. Sporadic use of hand held cameras and fish- eye lenses only confuse the issue more. To keep the budget low there are no extras. Period. This could be used to good effect with some back story but back story isn't what this is about. That is, except for a 10-15min sequence towards the end where all the "secrets" are spilled. As noted, the budgeted no money for special effects meaning no flying heads, no wounds, no gore of any kind unless you count the $1.50 they spent of fake blood in one scene. Sub par acting. Some nudity. No suspense.
I'm happy I didn't pay to see this.
Kristi and the Time Machine (2011)
Torture Porn and Trash Humpers Masks
Words fail me. I thought Abducted By Daleks reached the depths of bad porn. How wrong I was. This is torture porn with pretensions. Richard Stalin *might* have hoped to remake Party Girl A Go Go or Cafe Flesh. Probably not, though. He just wanted to torture women in the most annoying way possible. So he bought two Trash Humpers masks, some voice altering software and found the woman with the biggest vagina in the world and got to work. How latently homosexual and misogynistic is this movie? Great question. There's a scene where Grandma jerks of Grandpa but it's obvious that it's the two male actors. But it's worse than that. They use a dildo for Gramp's penis. In fact, there are no actual penises in the entire movie. Not one. All insertion is done with objects - guns, candles, etc - or fingers. That's just psychotic and not in a funny ha-ha way. Top that off with every single dubbed syllable put through voice software and you've got a headache in about 5mins. Towards the end of this abortion, they don't even try to match up the dialog to what's going on on screen.
I was going to give this a 1 but will give it a two so it has no chance of someone stumbling across it at the bottom of the IMDb list.
Jeunes filles impudiques (1973)
Total Deconstruction Of The Genre
I enjoyed this movie so much! At first, it looked like just another Rollin flesh fest (not that that's a bad thing) but there's really no such thing.
It starts off with overly dramatic narration from the lead woman and continues its aggressively comic-book style up until the end. The whole thing is a smart, sexy goof on film noir. I'm slightly surprised Rollin even bothered to give the characters names since they're only meant to be archetypes.
The two girlfriends go off on a camping trip and stumble across what they think is an empty villa. So they break in and have hot, but bizarre sex involving a racking orgasm from nuzzling a hip bone. Seriously. This does contain some borderline hardcore shots but that's not Rollin's focus. He shows you how ridiculous this fantasy is. The proof? At the end of the sex scene, the camera sits outside the door. Monica rises, looking at the audience and, since the show's over, shuts the door on us.
"Drugged by love" (I think that's what the script said), Jackie falls asleep and Monica realizes that someone else is in the house. Since it's a comic book, she sees Fred, a thug, and they have sex without much talk about it. Fred never once takes off his pants. Seriously! It's hilarious! It's not an oversight or bad filmmaking. It's on purpose. For all the gratuitous amounts of female nudity, we don't get even a glimpse of men's underwear.
Jackie wakes up and finds her girlfriend having sex and...well...what they hay...it's France: let's have a manage a trois! w00t! Morning comes. The girls take off...to set up their tent and (it's implied) have more sex somewhere else. This is like Bunuel meets Goddard. It's aggressively and purposefully nonsensical.
Finally, about a third of the way in, we get to the plot which concerns stolen jewels. Even this isn't really clear. Fred got the jewels for Béatrice who show up to retrieve them. But they're not there. Fred finds the girls and brings them back. Jackie gets convincingly caned. Monic gets away and...runs to a private eye. Not to the cops. How does she get there? Run? Hitch? A bus? It doesn't matter. This movie is all about getting to a pre-determined plot point and the hell with details. This is about deconstruction bordering on satire.
Will the detective help Monica? Sure! Why not? Let's go! Off they go to the villa to find Jackie. The detective, like Scooby Doo, works pro bono, I guess, since payment never gets brought up. Naturally, they don't find her...specifically because 1) they only search half the house and not the half the bad guys are in and 2) you cannot figure out the layout of the house. It's like the tents in the Harry Potter books - the space just kind of shows up as needed.
The good guys find the bad guys. Battle ensues - Monica v. Béatrice mano a mona and the detective and his helper with guns. The ensuing slapstick rivals Mack Sennet. Continuity gets thrown right out the window with some amazing editing. People seem to teleport from place to place moved only via editing. .
I won't spoil the ending because I shouldn't
If you're a Rollin fan then you know what to expect. If you don't, you still might not get it but you WILL get a lot of nudity and that will make up for not understanding the mechanics of it.
sxtape (2013)
Missing More Than The E
I should have known this would be miserable. And it was. The clue was the pretentious missing E but I actress was kind of hot and...well...I'm an idiot.
Jill and Adam live in the stereotypical "art space" that their parents probably pay for. They have a lot of sex and talk about "art". That's the extent of their relationship and about the only part of the movie that works. Adam finds an abandoned hospital and shows it to Jill. OOH! They can use it an an ART SPACE!. If you can get past the ridiculousness of this you have more tolerance than I.
They wander around making plans. Jill, in a clue to how much thought she put into her art, says she can just sign the garbage lying around and that's art. They find a room with a strap-down table. Adam straps Jill down and leaves her there for...well, we don't know how long, and she's assaulted by some spirit. Adam come back. They have sex until Jill's nose literally bleeds. Good job, Adam! They get freaked out, leave the building and...ruh-roh! - her car's getting towed away! Of all the BAD LUCK. They call for a ride from a friend who shows up with her dickish boyfriend.
And decide to go back in the building because it worked out so well the first time.
An hour later, the movie ends.
If you like movies where the characters actively work against their own self- interests simply because of the script and lack any kind of logic at all (the water, power and video equipment in hospital all still work) then you'll love this. If, however, you need even a hint of reality to your suspense, don't waste your time.
Creeper (2012)
Which Men's Rights Group Made This?
I watch a LOT of horrible movies, even Blood Sucking Freaks is less misogynistic than this abortion.
The setup is that a group of women decide that because men send them pictures of their junk that revenge is warranted. That's not a bad premise, actually. But these women are sociopaths. They don't want revenge for their suffering sisters. They want it because they're bitches who like to see people suffer. To call them "mean girls" gives them too much credit. The scriptwriter wants you to know that they are the human scum they spend FAR too much times talking about. Seriously - there's probably a good ten minutes of their contempt for men.
To prove this, Gunnoe has them target...a retard. They find him on a cam site and make him their "slave", forcing him to debase himself while they have some unrequited, suppressed lesbian thing going on. They SO horrible, they decide to meet up with him and...KILL HIM! (Gasp!)...because he deserves it. They meet up with him and beat up this 6' 7" giant of a war veteran, wrap a cord around his next and taunt him as he dies. Their plan to get away with it is that he was the aggressor and that "pretty girls don't go to jail." Yes. Gunnoe actually writes that.
But he doesn't die. And he's not a "retard". The anti-psychotic meds prescribed to him rendered him barely functional. A year later and off his meds, he takes his revenge in the most ridiculous possible way. He installs an extensive wifi network in a forest and rigs up cameras, tracks the "bitches" down and broadcasts it. The rest of the movie consists of naked women running around a forest. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Gunnoe gives us no reason to suspend our disbelief at any point in this "film". You don't have to be an IT professional to know that you can't just rewire a tablet to "turn it into a GPS tracking device, send out our coordinates for help and now we know where he is." These are women who we come to find can't even figure out a stick shift. Calling the characters one-dimensional does the laws of physics and injustice.
Darryl Baldwin's performance as the victim (as Gunnoe would like you to think of him) almost comes close to working but falls apart the moment he has to do something other than look menacing. The women's performances consist of whining or Nazi- like condemnations of anyone who's not them. If there was even a hint of humor or self-awareness in this abortion it might have worked out. Instead, we get and ending with some elite military team which includes a moss-man. I'm not kidding.
One sentence review: Sorry about your penis size, dude.
Necromentia (2009)
Too Confused And Confusing
I love the idea of this movie but the logistics don't work and that kills the final product for me. Told in a Pulp Fiction piece-it-together style, it tells the story of love, betrayal and resurrection but leaves out some fairly important information. How did the parents die? Why does their will not provide for adequate care of their children? And even *if* you're a junkie, how, when you run an underground scarification business, do you NOT charge your clients enough to survive on? Seriously. That ran through my head throughout the whole movie. Also - how do you cut off a client's finger and just continue on as if nothing happens? For me, this shows that no matter how much thought went into the movie (and it's an interesting premise), in the end Reginald choose cheap gore-points over an actual vision. The movie just...ends without a major plot point resolved.
The performances work well and the direction is decent. The pacing needs tweaking so as not to allow the viewer to actually think about the plot holes. While consistently a little too dark, the movie looks fantastic which is why I kept watching after the questions started popping up.
The pay off isn't worth the time invested. Worse, you really need to pay attention and that makes the ending even more disappointing.
Strip Club Slasher (2010)
Almost A Passable Waste Of Time
This is mostly just to counteract the sockpuppet review.
Unless you didn't graduate high school, it's pretty much assured that it's impossible for a movie called Strip Club Slasher to get 10 stars. And for a low budget movie, you'd have to raise Orson Welles from the dead. That said, it borders on passable crap. The strippers look the part - they moderately overweight, not very good dancers and talk like they're retarded. Good casting and kudos to the screenwriter for portraying them so well!
Outside of that, it's just a masturbatory fantasy. After a co-worker is killed, the strippers flounce off to someone's house to drink, drug and have sex. Because that's how strippers react to death, right? "Hey, our friend died six hours ago! Let's go have sex in the shower!" BECAUSE THEY'RE STRIPPER, RIGHT?!
There's plenty of bad thrash metal throwing around the f-word (and one decent song), a bunch of not terribly photogenic breasts and, though it might have been the murky lighting, I'm pretty sure there was at least one c-section scar. The sound is horrible with a lot of scenes overpowered with ambient hum. The "sex" scenes leave you limp, especially when one of the lesbian couple leaves their underwear on and the other is obviously just looking at her partners cooch at a respectful distance. If your actors aren't going to act, just leave that stuff out. Your film will be better for it.
Maybe it's a Minnesota phrase, but I've *never* heard a woman say "I'm wetter than a slaughter house floor." That about sums up the level of the script. The fake endings made me laugh. "I'm just going to make sure he's dead." Um...why don't you just flash a message at the bottom of the scene saying "HE'S NOT REALLY DEAD"? You can only really go to that well once. Three times? That's not groundbreaking. It's just dumb. Also, I know that it's a movie but teleporting your to the next kill spot with no explanation on how he got there is not mysterious. It's lame.
On the plus side - they made a movie and people watched. I gave an extra star because the pacing actually worked pretty well.
Ballet of Blood (2015)
Ballet of Boring
For the amount of drugs in this movie, you'd think there would be a LOT more actual nudity. If there were, I'd give it a higher rating. As it stands, the movie revolves around a bunch of 7's hanging around in unitards and, when drugging it up, lingerie while they wait for a psycho ballerina to show up and kill them. And it's a loooooong, long slog, folks. They "dance" about as well as they "act". But this movie isn't about delineating characters or trying to engage the errant viewer into investing in anyone. Nobody's likable. It's not even clear why they take so many drugs. Maybe it's a ballerina thing?
Shot entirely on hand-held, the lighting is atrocious and the sound levels fluctuate wildly, specially, the head of the school who, judging from the amount of silicone dump in various parts of her body, had a Russian accent so thick they dubbed her voice. It's a point and shoot affair with no pretensions as to what it's about. But it fails at that, too? Suspense? Nope. Horror? Nope. Gore? Nope. Sex? Nope. Titillation? Nope? Drama? Comedy? Nope. Well..there's a few hilarious lines such as "there's nothing sexual about doing coke off of someone else's body" but that's more the miserable line reading than anything else.
Summing up - this is shite, pure and simple with literally nothing to recommend about it. One star for trying. One star to keep it off the bottom 100 so no one's watches it by accident.
Ratter (2015)
Chills
One of the reasons I explore the out of the way places when it comes to film. Low budget and shot mostly on webcams, this movie evokes a sense of dread and horror without showing a drop of blood. The moral, if there is one, says that danger in the 21st century no longer needs mass or form.
Emma is surrounded by the technology that slowly becomes a menace to her as a stalker takes over her devices and the devices of others. A nameless presence oozes through the movie with no clear indication of who or why - it's just nameless malice floating through the same ether as the wireless signals that connect her. As such, it's filmed entirely on hand-held, cell phone and webcam. While this gets annoying at times, the filmmakers break up with some nice editing moves. The performances are solid and engaging. The stark, brutal ending horrified me with its unspoken implications.
(BTW - to the person who trashed this, insisting that the rating was inflated, I didn't even know this film existed. If you didn't like it (and I'm betting the lack of nudity and gore played a part in that) that's fine. But don't be a dick.)
Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (2009)
What Movie Did You People Watch?
This movie was an insult on so many levels. Hackneyed dialog, horrible direction, dull performances and a diabetic score that left me searching for the insulin.
Let's just take the sequence where God taught Ben Carson chemistry. There's absolutely no set up for it. Ben gets transported to a dream sequence with some pointy bearded man at the chalkboard. Who is he? Is he God? Is he a teacher? We don't know because setting up who he is would have eaten up 10 seconds of endless surgery footage. Ascribing Carson's 97 on the test to God implies that Carson really didn't do any studying. New flash - God doesn't help you pass tests. Carson's mother is cured of her depression in two weeks? That's insulting. Carson gets the respect of a bully by winning a "yo mama" battle? The interview to get into Johns Hopkins left me seriously questioning the credibility of that institution. Incidents of interest get thrown away as soon as they happen. He tries to kill his mother with a hammer and his mother says she'll give him control of the finances....and.................there's no resolution. The movie skips from scene to scene with no flow whatsoever. None.
Throughout it all, there's miserable dialog. While cleaning some professor's house you get the following: Professor: Mrs Carson? Mrs. Carson: Yes? Professor: It's the kitchen floor. Mrs. Carson: Yes? Professor: It sparkles!
You get tons of "hard work ain't never hurt nobody"'s and the obligatory "he had to overcome racism, too, poor guy!" scene. It's all so sanitized and laughable that that it's hard to take seriously. You also get ooddles of soul music when Ben's on screen despite being told that Ben doesn't listen to that music. Did foosball actually help him become a surgeon? Apparently so!
Don't get me wrong - I know this movie is complete and utter fiction but it's the dangerous fiction that passes itself off a true. The only good reason to watch this film is teach people how to identify the use of propaganda in cinema.
Night of the Groping Dead (2001)
Misty Mundae Could Have Sex With A Phone Book And I'd Watch It
Outside of Mistry Mundae there's no good reason to watch this drek. It doesn't matter what she's in or who she's playing, she commits to whatever she's doing and is usually the only person who's acting. I know that sounds stupid to say of a primarily soft-core porn actress, but it's true.
The reset of the film is not even laughably bad. It just out right sucks. From horrible gore to bad, obviously simulated oral stimulation of "S & M dick" (seriously) to the worst "English" accent and facial hair on film, there's literally nothing (except Misty Mundae) going for this film. Factory 2000 films aren't art. This one is barely a movie, (Except for Misty Mundae.)
Applecart (2015)
Sophomore Art Sleeze
I don't want to trash this film, because there's a sincerity to it. That said, I imagine the casting notice included, "must be willing to masturbate on film".
The film is a series of four short, downbeat films with various shots of apples in between them. Mills appears to love David Lynch's Rabbits series since the style of all four mirrors it - mostly static shots, minimal or no sound with canned audience response with some fairly effective, almost imperceptible sound effects occasionally thrown in.
The theme of each of the films is squalor and death. I'm tempted so say Mills was just looking for shock value but I feel he was shooting slightly above that. Still, in The Sleepover, Dad masturbates while watch his daughter and her friend engage in lesbian sex. Mom sees this and kills everyone. In Caretaker, we see elder abuse including urinating in the old man's oatmeal, more masturbation, sex and then death. In Dad, the rebellious daughter of a hypocritical Christian masturbates, get pregnant by her boyfriend (who the Dad then kills) and then she dies giving herself and abortion. In the final film, a working class guy gets rejected by a female co- worker. The guy's friend (being a pal) abducts her and gets killed by his friend for his pains. Then the guy masturbates while she's chained up and, after she's released...she kills him.
The actors in all of the stories wear masks. I know this is supposed to be a statement (the tag line is "Everyone wears masks") but there's not enough meat on (no pun intended) or variation in the stories for this pretension to work. That's not to say it's not effective. Except for the final story which suffers from the lack of dialog, the actors do a good job. I've done mask work and it's not easy get your point across without using you face.
It also speaks to the competence of the script that Mills pulled off the complete lack of dialog.
The black and white photography is lovely and works well. The film looks very nice. Even though the apple motif isn't developed (that I could see on one viewing) they're a nice linking device and, again, look lovely.
If you want something odd and have a penchant for joyless masturbation, this is your movie. I'm sure Mills has some better movies in him and I'd love to see him as he matures.
Savage Vengeance (1993)
Dry Humping Is Rape
Apparently, Jennifer learned nothing from I Spit on Your Grave. One would think that after her last hellish vacation in the woods, she'd look to the city when she needs some respite from the stress of being recognized by her professor at the junior college. Small wonder she and the friend she drags with her get raped. Well, "raped" because through some apparently in the country, when you have consensual or non-consensual sex, you leave your clothes on. In all three rape scenes, the filmmaker doesn't even pretend to suggest sex. This is just one of the laughably lame aspects of this video. (Calling it a movie is like calling Kim Kardashian talented.)
How about this little exchange?
Sam: I'm carrying 18 credits this semester! I can't just up and leave! Jennifer: I'll buy the beer. Sam: O-o-o-o-OK
There's not a decent inch of tape in the whole proceedings. After Jennifer gets dry-humped, Tommy takes out a knife and cuts into her chest with a bargain basement blood knife which may actually be plastic. Jennifer gets left for dead (I think...it's not clear). When Jennifer resurrects, GOD BE PRAISED, she's completely healed! PRAISE HIM!
The soundtrack (give me a minute to bang my head against broken glass....thanks) sounds like it's improvised by a six year old who just got a synthesizer. "Oh! Look! This button turns on the flange! On! Off! On! Off!" The keyboardist can't even keep time and occasionally resorts to just banging on the keyboard.
Originally billed as I Spit on Your Grave 2, the resemblance ends at the name. The power of I Spit on Your Grave sprung from its realism and brutality. This one is the wrong kind of cringe-worthy.
To the Death (1992)
Ridiculous
A kickboxer retires at the top of his game and turns down a lucrative fight deal with a shady kickboxer promoter who kills the losers of his matches. Then the boxer's wife is blown up. Who might have done it? Hm. That seems pretty obvious. The kickboxer, rather than find out who killed his wife, becomes a drunk. The promoter pulls him out of the gutter and makes the same offer which he now accepts, for some reason. Include in the mix his the promoter's coke-whore girlfriend.
This movie is a mess. All of the clichés you'd expect are here. Even the MC of the matches, dressed up like Joel Grey in Cabaret, seems pretentious and boring.