Mini Movie Mreviews: Godzilla lives on

Welcome to Mini Movie Mreviews, a feature where I take you through the movies I've watched in the last week or two. These reviews are geared toward those who HAVEN'T seen the film and just want to know if they should watch. I give my condensed recommendation in italics at the end of each review.

At the rate I'm moving through the Godzilla series, I think the MMM format is most appropriate. At this point I've seen eight of the movies, seven in the past two months....

If you're confused by any of the terminology in this post - and actually care - here's a Godzilla Cheat Sheet. 

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) [English dub]
Freaky. At the height of Godzilla becoming a kids' series, vs. Hedorah throws us a foreboding psychedelic curve-ball twisting together nuclear holocaust, a living landfill, bad acid trips, and Godzilla himself drowning in sludge. The anti-pollution message is so heavy-handed that it wraps around to be oppressively horrifying - Hedorah is pollution incarnate, a mass of slime and sludge that rips from smokestacks like a bong and exhales gas so poisonous it burns the flesh from human bones. This movie doesn't pull any punches when it comes to human casualties; we see men and women - even an actual character - stripped to the bone by Hedorah's acidic fumes, and news reports actually give us a running death toll. Tens of thousands fall to Hedorah - to pollution - to industry - to the hubris of the human race. Hedorah is the folly of industry come back to haunt us, just as Godzilla was originally the folly of nuclear war incarnate. This time Hero-zilla takes on the role of the spirit of nature, first shown vainly trying to clean up Earth's desecrated oceans (though hilariously, Godzilla is valiantly burning the trash - what the hell man, are you trying to make things worse?). His adoring young fan Ken (our human protagonist) seems to be less an association of Godzilla with humanity and more of a call for the younger generation to abandon the old ways of polluting the environment to stand (with Godzilla) against industry.

What really sets vs. Hedorah apart is the trippy, frantic audio/visual style, inter-cutting soul music, funk, folk, acid rock, and eerie silence with scenes of carnage, dance clubs, blighted seas, hippy bonfires, monster battles, and even some freaky Ralph Bakshi-esque animations.

Like most Godzilla films I've enjoyed, this is unfortunately a great 60-minute movie in a 90-minute package, with too much pseudo-scientific exposition (I don't think Hedorah needed to originate in space) and a painfully drawn-out series of fake-out endings. The humans' electro-generator thing in particular could've been cut almost entirely; it was boring as shit to watch and took like fifteen minutes to setup.

Not particularly representative of the series, but a terrific and unique movie. A must-watch for fans of the G-man, psychedelia, or '70s eco-horror.

Godzilla (1984) [Japanese, subtitled]
So I've decided to watch the entire Heisei series, and right here is where it starts: the 1984 revival of the property from a decade-long hiatus. Godzilla '84 picks up right where Godzilla '54 left off, conveniently ignoring all the monster battles, smog monster battles, and illegitimate children that happened in between.

It's appropriate that this movie is so blandly titled, as it's perhaps the blandest series entry I've yet seen. It is boring as fucking fuck. If you happen to have seen any of the later Heisei movies and are expecting the same from this, you'll be sorely disappointed (as was I). This is essentially Showa-quality special effects and action with a slightly darker presentation surrounded by a bunch of half-plots about characters who get cursory 10-minute arcs before being discarded as the over-arching narrative sees fit.

I realize this series isn't really about the human characters and I've never expected much on that front - perhaps what bugs me about Godzilla ('84) is that it seems to think I will care about the various one-dimensional faces it introduces, from the boring reporter to the boring prime minister to the terrifyingly out-of-place comic relief drunk. They each get some time onscreen to have some kind of personal dilemma and theoretically a conflict, none of them are developed to any depth or resolved in any meaningful way - in fact they just eat up screen time without developing the plot or themes (lol) of the movie at all. If you only give me a few minutes with a character, I'm just not going to be able to get involved in their story, and I'm certainly not going to be able to unceremoniously switch gears five times over the course of the movie.

Yeah don't watch this one, it is tedious, boring, and redundant. Also, Godzilla gets killed by a bird-machine and that is just stupid.

Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) [Japanese, subtitled]
Almost certainly my favorite Godzilla film thus far, vs. Biollante tells the story of one man's boundless dream to resurrect his daughter by empowering a psychic rose with the DNA of Godzilla and... then... something. Dr. Shinagami's daughter died near a rose plant. He saved that rose. He worked under contract for the government so he could get access to Godzilla cells. On a (literally) dark and stormy night, he merged a Godzilla cell with a rose cell (by injecting one into the other - science, lol!) to create a super-rose. This unleashed a gigantic horrific Godzilla-Rose-Monster, Biollante. You could say things didn't go according to plan, but what was the plan? Create a non-gigantic horrific rose monster? Reincarnate his daughter as a radioactive psychic rose - "like she always wanted"? Better not to ask. It's not like Dr. Frankenstein had a plan, right?!

This movie starts the unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on your opinion and the particular movie) tradition of the Heisei series riffing on popular 'contemporary' Western movies. Here it's an cop/spy action subplot where two of our heroes have to play keep-away with a maguffin against a vaguely Middle-Eastern, suspiciously Prince-looking agent. In case this is too vague to key any tropes for you, the subplot also involves a pair of American agents, one white and one black, who literally speak the line, "we are a lethal weapon!"

The fight with Biollante is undoubtedly my favorite kaiju battle so far

Vs. Biollante has some of the most intense and brutal monster battles you'll see in a Godzilla movie (these are almost on par with Heisei Gamera) on top of fantastic creature design. The film manages to make Biollante both beautiful and horrifying - as the saying goes, "you can't have a genetically modified super-rose without its mile-long tendril swarms and acidic secretions".

If you love giant monsters, THIS is the movie for you. If you love corny '80s movies, that'll just be a bonus. If you only want to watch one Godzilla, this is definitely the #1 latter-day candidate. 

Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) [Japanese, subtitled]
This movie is terrible. There are funny parts, but it's so overwhelmingly terrible that after a certain point I had a hard time enjoying the ridiculous camp. See, the problem is that it's built around a terrible core. Most of the Godzilla series, despite its middling execution, is built from really cool ideas. Or at least, ideas that appeal to me. See the above vs. Hedorah and vs. Biollante. Vs. King Ghidorah is just really, really fucking stupid. It is a movie written by idiots (or written in an extremely insane way) that has no goal in mind beyond imitating great works that are far, far beyond its reach. I think I would not be alone in worrying that time travel is too high-concept for the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah makes this clearer than it ever needed to be: time travel is too high-concept for the Godzilla franchise.

I have never watched a movie with more plot holes, and that is not an exaggeration. Everything in the movie feels so distinctly conceived-by-a-five-year-old that my head almost exploded. The entire point of time travel is that things happen synchronously in different time periods. Kill Godzilla before he's born, and he should cease to exist forever. That's not how it works here. In GvKG, if you jump in a time machine on 11/4/1991, travel to 11/4/1945 and kill the dinosaur that will become Godzilla, then return to 11/4/1991... Godzilla drops dead on 11/4/1991. What the hell does that even mean?! I spent at least a half hour of the movie just thinking about that. Why not just have a device that kills Godzilla? The time travel served ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE! IT DIDN'T CHANGE THE PAST! There's also the fucking ridiculous convolution that the movie is set in 1991, but the time travelers are from 2204, but Godzilla was born around 1945, so the time travelers come back to 1991 to tell the people in 1991 "Hi, we're here to tell you that we're here to travel back in time to 1945 to kill Godzilla, okay?" Obviously the reason is that it was too expensive to set the entire movie in 2204, but it's hilariously nonsensical that the time-travelers essentially 'stop by' the movie to tell us about their plans (and inevitably foil their own sinister plot).

Gotta give credit where it's due: I never cease to be amused by anti-European racism in foreign movies. Three people show up from the future, two white, one Japanese. Guess which two turn out to be evil? The conniving, interloping European stereotype cracks me up every time.

This time the parody subplot (are they parodies though?) seems to be based on Terminator, as the future people utilize a powerful but emotionless android soldier whose skin at one point gets torn off to reveal he looks like a mechanical skeleton. At some point, in a scene accidentally edited in from T2, he gets reprogrammed and becomes good, and also runs like The Six-Million Dollar Man. There are also scenes shot-for-shot taken from Star Wars, and Back to the Future, so... I don't even know what to say about that. It doesn't seem like a joke. It's just fucking weird and gives the whole thing a not-a-real-movie feel. Doesn't help that the future costumes are insanely cheap and look like something Devo would wear.

I dunno. All of the pieces add up to a movie that should be a riot of unintentional comedy, but I was totally annoyed and disgusted the entire way through. I say skip it - there are plenty of other funny Godzillas that won't make your head hurt.

Godzilla vs. Destroyah (1995) [English dub]

While you may be asking why I jumped ahead three movies, skipping Godzilla vs. Mothra, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla 2, and Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla, you actually ought to be asking why I started the Heisei series here at vs. Destoroyah before jumping back to the beginning. It's because whatever. Anyway.

Destroyah is pretty neat plotwise, in that it takes a lot of arbitrary concepts and doesn't overcomplicate them. GvKG tried to play way out of its league with scifi high concepts and got smoked - this time around, fictional leaps are used to facilitate new and cool monsters, so I can happily suspend my disbelief. Destoroyah is a pre-Cambrian life-form that is hyper-evolving because of the modern climate? Well, that's not what "evolution" means, but sure, whatever. It means I get to see four (technically five) different forms of the monster over the course of the movie, so I'm cool with it. It even makes Destoroyah one of the most interesting threats since Ghidorah in that it gives him not just a limitless power level, but pairs each power-up with a completely new look and style of fighting. He goes from battling soldiers indoors to soaring over skyscrapers to towering over Godzilla - in some sense, Destoroyah alone is sort of a throwback to a number of other kaiju, which makes him a great final opponent for the Heisei Godzilla.

Of course, again there was a Western movie reference/parody thing (it actually felt like an homage this time around). Destoroyah's first form is a collective of 4-meter-tall insectoids that attack a squad of marines in an industrial complex. It's a shot-for-shot remake of the first action sequence of Aliens. Oh well.

You could say the movie was a little bloated, but considering that it was bloated with an entertaining variety of monster battles including a new Thermal Godzilla, Junior Godzilla, four forms of Destoroyah, and the triumphant return of the Super X, it didn't bother me. There was a lot going on, but I'll take that over vs. Hedorah's excruciating fascination with one boring character/gimmick.

Solid is the word that comes to mind. Exemplary for a Godzilla movie - if you want to know what the series is all about, it definitely won't hurt to start here. Have crackers ready for a hearty helping of cheese and enjoy the action.

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There you have it. Five more Godzillas down. Five to go. Then another fifteen after that. Just for fun, here's an approximate current ranking from best to worst:

Godzilla vs. Biollante
Godzilla vs. The Thing (aka Mothra vs. Godzilla)
Godzilla vs. Hedorah
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah
Ghidorah: The Three-headed Monster
Godzilla ('54)
Godzilla ('84)
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

MMM: This feature probably should indicate in the name that it's about Horror Movies

Welcome to Mini Movie Mreviews, a feature where I take you through the movies I've watched in the last week or two. These reviews are geared toward those who haven't seen the film and just want to know if they should watch - so don't not read it and then say "oh well I've never seen any of those movies" - that's the point. I give my condensed recommendation in italics at the end of each review.

Waxwork

Hey look, it's Zach Galligan! That old boy was in Gremlins! Unfortunately he's kind of an annoying actor to watch. He has that awkward '80s doofy loser thing down to a science. This one is a string of references to old monster movies, immortalized as wax exhibits that prove to be gateways into their according worlds. The lightly comic tone didn't work for me (no good jokes), but the variety of sets and shifting atmospheres provide a lot to keep you entertained. There's also a preeeettttty seXXXy sequence wherein one of the leading girls finds herself enjoying life with the Marquis de Sade a little more than she expects. An inventive creeper that won't leave you bored.

Crawlspace

Man this has some of the most obnoxious Nazi-sploitation I've ever seen. There's a scene where the villain stands in his attic watching an old filmstrip of Nazi marches with incomprehensible Hitler yelling playing on the sound system, and he stands in front of it shouting "HEIL!" This is a kinda bizarre slasher in the Peeping Tom vein in which an old ex-Nazi landlord spies on and eventually murders his tenants. The focal character here is the peeper, not any of his carefully chosen attractive young female victims. This thankfully spares us from the stock innocent young girl Jamie Lee Curtis slasher protagonist, but also provides very little to draw the viewer in personally. The creepy murderer is just really bizarre and his motives are so conflicting and nonsensical that you won't care for him and his daily game of Russian roulette in the least. A particular piano-themed murder makes for a memorable image, but otherwise there's little in the way of entertaining violence. Not much reason to bother.

Suspiria
If you know the word giallo or the name Dario Argento, you've probably already seen this one. For those of you in the dark, giallo is a subgenre of Italian horror film primarily popular in the 1970s, noted for distinctively expressionist visuals, seas of faker-than-fake blood, and mind-bending patchwork plots. Suspiria is very much a poster child for this movement. The sets are striking enough to be paintings, the story is an utter headache, the acting is over-the-top cheesy, and the nail-polish blood splatters enough to make you sick. It's great downfall is that aesthetics are the only thing going for it. The plot is, I struggle to put this nicely, just plain retarded. Something about witches shows up like 3/4 through the runtime without any warning - apparently the whole movie was about a coven of witches who run a German dancing school as a front for... well primarily it's just a dancing school, but I guess every once in a while they feel like murdering someone. It makes me angry to think about how stupid it is. The film opens with the preposterous death of two on the school's students, but only one of them is ever mentioned again. At first it seems like the identify of the second girl is being kept a secret and carries some significance... then you realize the filmmakers clearly forgot about her / wrote it out of the script. Worst of all, the movie is just fucking boring. So many scenes drag on for six to seven times what should be their length, leaving you wondering if you're actually watching Journey to the Center of the Hallway. It's sad what an awful film this is, because the imagery is indeed gorgeous and the polarizing music is fantastic as well. Unless you really need another giallo, skip it. It'll go over the head of or annoy the shit out of any but genre-fans.

House on Haunted Hill
I think it's safe to say I'm developing quite the affection for Vincent Price. The guy is just a joy to watch on screen. His every line of dialogue begs to be savored and his smirk makes me smile just thinking about it. The movie's other redeeming feature is one of the most classic skeleton scenes this side of Army of Darkness (see below). Yes, I say redeeming, because unfortunately this is just kind of a stupid movie with a gimmicky premise that doesn't even begin to hold up.

Presumably the filmmakers want us to believe the House on Haunted Hill is Haunted, as the villain wants the rest of the characters to believe. But the tricks are far too shabby to keep any but the most naive viewer going, and the goal of this Scooby-Doo scheme turns out to be so stupid that, well, it may as well be an episode of Scooby-Doo. I'm going to go ahead and spoil it because you shouldn't watch anyway: the villain goes along with her husband inviting a handful of people to the "haunted" house, goes along with her husband giving them all guns, and then tries to drive one of them crazy enough that they'll accidentally shoot her husband in their hysteria. The problem is that again the filmmakers fail to make sense of their ruse - they want us to believe Vincent Price is the villain, then when the true mastermind is unveiled, the logic of the plot falls apart. Why would he have been the one to set everything up for his wife's murder scheme? Ugh. Just dumb. Don't bother, even for Price's sake. All you need to see is in the gif above.

House on Haunted Hill, again
And then we have the 1999 remake. The '90s were not good to horror cinema, so it's almost shocking to find this so much more effective than the "classic" on which it's based. Critics complained that it wasn't scary enough - I'm sorry, critics, but are any movies really scary at all? You either get atmospheric dread, gruesome imagery, or startling jumps. I don't see how it's fair to ask for something no film delivers. It's just a fucking movie, and sooner or later you grow older than 12. Anyway, allow me to rerail this discussion. The remake is smart enough to devise its own twists and turns while drawing on enough similar sequences to remain grounded in the original. While I just made clear that I don't like that 1959 piece, the connection still serves to heighten this revisitation and makes for good paired viewing, if only to show where one goes right and the other wrong. One welcome '90s trapping is that the female cast is easy on the eyes and the content is now very R-rated, while the original would today be considered pretty safely PG. Overall it's a pretty by-the-books 'good' movie, never great or hugely memorable. Well-paced, functionally scripted, nice to look at,  and occasionally funny. Check it out with friends for a fun B-movie romp.

MMM: Mini Movie Mreview of some weird horror movies

Alright, it's just about time (or I guess it is time...) to knock out another MMM, before I get too far ahead of myself. Like usual, here comes a crop of mostly horror movies that you can find on Netflix Instant Q. Four of these five are worth your time, so open a new tab, get over to http://dvd.netflix.com/queue and start adding.

Dead Heat

Weird.

I don't know who in the damn hell Joe Piscopo is supposed to be, but he sure ain't no damn actor. He has an awfully distracting presence in what otherwise is a pretty cool genre crossover. The film fakes you out at first and has you thinking it's going to be Lethal Weapon, but all of a sudden the main cop dies. Then he comes back to life. Then the other main cop dies. Then he comes back to life. The notion of these detectives investigating their own murder is pretty novel, though in reality it boils down to a revenge tale. It's still fun to see the main characters axed with the fervor of a horror film. There are also some creepy horror/scifi FX that contribute a more interesting look to the film. It's a buddy cop zombie flick! Give it a shot, but be warned that Piscopo's humor is eye-rollingly try-hard obscene.

Re-Animator
Dear God Re-Animator is fantastic. This is the best horror film I've seen in an age (yes, better than Hellraiser or Basketcase), combining gorgeously inventive gore (I'm a sucker for intestines coming to life), a totally unhinged Jeffrey Combs performance (I wish I could find you the clip where he yells "Oooverdooooooossssse!"), Barbara Crampton's excellent rack (famed also thanks to From Beyond), cartoony violence (Combs stage-wrestling a zombie cat), and a suspenseful plot that just begs for a sequel. Sure it's not a particularly 'scary' movie, but neither is anything. Just... go watch it. It's a waste of my time to describe it here. It's on Netflix IQ, you've got no excuse. Use my account for all I care. You'll be telling your friends about the laughs and gross-outs for days. Yes, please.

Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth

Annnnnnnnnd, that's it for Hellraiser. You may remember I'm a fan of the first two, but 3 abandons their strongest elements. We no longer have a cool, evil protagonist; instead we're split between a lame reporter do-gooder and a cheesy, sleazy tough-guy club owner. It's just... lame, sorry. The movie kinda works if you completely forget the Hellraiser tie and watch it as a humorously bad B-movie. I mean, it has this:

The previous movies told dark fairy tales about isolated individuals drawn into a frightening, mysterious alternate dimension. The threat was the waning barrier between realities, the inevitable pull towards a bizarre and unknowable world whose grisly inhabitants seemed all too happy with their own mutilation. Hellraiser 3 is about some ghoulies getting lose and terrorizing a town. The real villain before was the portal, the Lament Configuration: an arcane puzzle box that stumbled into the protagonists hands. Now it is firmly Pinhead, the somewhat silly slasher monster from the cover. If you want to know how the franchise went wrong, this isn't the worst movie ever. It's not good, either.

Mimic
Probably considered a lesser Guillermo del Toro work, this nonetheless shines with his acclaimed art design. It's a movie about giant hyper-evolved bug people living in the sewer of some city. Don't expect it to make a shred of goddamn sense. Seriously, it may have more plot holes than any non-time-travel movie ever. But you're not watching for plot anti-holes, you're watching to see giant bug people, and on this del Toro delivers. He's thankfully a smart enough director to keep his monsters in the shadows, letting our imagination do the heavy lifting, but we still get plenty to wince at. The biggest shortcoming is the wavering of scale - the bugs are supposed to feel like a threat to humanity, but as long as everyone stays out of the sewer, it seems like they don't kill anyone. So, I dunno. Watch it if you're a fan of del Toro's gruesome monstrosities.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks

You're probably expecting this to be bad. A sequel with a fraction of the budget and missing the lead (and most famous) actor isn't usually something anyone looks forward to. Surprisingly, Tremors 2 isn't half bad. It may even be better than Tremors, though I don't hold the original in the high esteem some do. The first Tremors was kinda boring, and the comic tone destroyed the tension. The monsters seemed to abide by almost Bugs Bunny rules, where you expect Kevin Bacon to disappear by putting a bush between himself and the camera. 

Tremors 2 works because it tones down this comic absurdity and delivers as a monster-hunting actioner. It's like the evolution between Alien and Aliens (with a much worse and 90's-er series). The lack of Bacon is hardly felt, though his replacement is the most unnecessary element of the film. The Starship Troopers era CGI isn't as tragic as some make it out to be, although there are one or two brutally ugly scenes that kinda just work as jokes.  Worth a look for anyone who enjoys scifi action. 

MMM: Man I haven't done Movie Mreviews in a while

Apologies all around. Then again it probably isn't such a terrible thing that this video game blog is populated with discussion of video games. Heaven fro bid.

I should do a ketchup of the movies I mentioned last time we did this feature, way back in September, but I don't feel like it because those aren't so actual in my brain. As fan-service, and because of OCD, let me just get them out of the way.

Jack's Back - When James Spader plays twins, everyone wins

Dead Snow - Soulless and lame

Night of the Comet - Hey that's Chakotay!

Not of this Earth - Dated and boring

Barbarella - Don't get the point but LOL @ weird

Here are some newer ones. Every one of these movies belongs to the category of "movies that I've seen". At the moment they seem to all fall into horror as well, I guess because I've been feeling spooky. 

Cabin in the Woods - Could you possibly fit in any more Evil Dead references? Clearly Joss Whedon took this line to heart. This movie is littered with genre-references, plenty of which are kept broad enough so everyone feels like they're on board. My only problem with it is that there's not enough comedy. The main character stable, though it's obviously supposed to be playing on stereotypes, is still weak. The heroic-y guy is beyond annoying and the leading lady bland. Clever concept (murder as an IT profession), great effects (sooooo much blood), but it falls just short of classic because there aren't any memorable characters. A must watch.

Session 9 - Now this was an interesting film. It's presented like horror, but quickly bares itself as more of a drama/mystery. Fear and paranoia is drawn on by real-world interpersonal conflicts and heightened by the setting in an insane asylum. The truth of the narrative gradually comes into focus as the playback of archival recordings approaches the tape labeled Session 9. A brutal emotional breakdown steeped in atmosphere. Watch if you're looking for something thinky rather than visceral.

The Masque of the Red Death - A bit of a curiosity, as this was my first introduction to both Roger Corman and Vincent Price, icons of B-movie horror. I don't know if it's the Corman-budget or the date on the box, but this movie feels archaic, belonging to an age still reminiscent of stage production. The plot, based on a Poe short story, is as predictable as one would expect. It's unfortunate, because the setup has much higher potential than the relatively tame payoff. There's not enough depth to the characters because a bunch of time is wasted on a stupid subplot taken from, I believe, an entirely separate Poe tale. Also, it's weird that you're not supposed to think of the Red Death as tuberculosis. Skip it. There's nothing to see that your daily Shakespeare troupe can't convey.

MMM - The recurring movie feature I hinted at, revisited

Some more mini movie reviews. These are bite-size, but if you eat them, they will taste like letters. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck I've got some old ones I have to do before I forget them. There's probably gonna be another one of these features one second after this one because I want to do the new ones that don't completely suck. 

Friday the 13th - There was something about this movie being a roller-coaster. Like the director or the producer or someone wanted the film to be the exact same experience as being on a roller-coaster. Bad news for whoever said it, whoever was supposed to do it, and us for watching it: it fucking blows. This is the ultimate pointless movie. It's not fun to watch, there's no subtext, no interesting visuals or actors, no plot, no nothing no more. It's a void into which you may, but shouldn't, dare to throw your time. Avoid like plague.

Remember, HE'S not even in the first one

The Burning - For whatever dumb reason, this is ANOTHER slasher about summer camp. There were a shitload of movies on the subject in the early '80s; was it Friday the 13th copyfoot, or was there a popular news story / urban legend, or were they, like, just invented? I don't fucking know. IIRC the idea of camp was a way for the rich to get rid of their children during the only season they had to deal with them. Okay. So camp movies are about ad hoc societies of children. Lord of the Flies. BORING. SO BORED. This one has like Jason Alexander as king though which I thought was funny, and there are some actual characters who do actual things, which is in sharp contrast to Fry13. If you want a camp slasher, this appears to be the best.

I Spit on Your Grave - Oh boy. Where to even start with this movie. We've got sexual violence, the mentally handicapped, and some kind of feminist agenda all wrapped up into a really honestly pretty brutally unwatchable movie that has been at various points marketed as a slasher or exploitation. I'm just gonna describe it because there's not much more you can do. The first part is about the assault and rape of a young woman by a handful of backwoods youths in a secluded community. This is BORING because it involves stuff like the woman renting a house and ordering a pizza and driving places and the guys seeing her and talking to her. It's the Friday the 13th thing - this is utter, meaningless shit. So you wade through this drivel for the supposed payoff which is a woman getting raped by four backwoods hooligans, one of whom is mentally retarded.

Now.

Let's.

Stop.

There.

What the FUCK is WRONG with someone who would want to watch this? I'm not passing judgment on the act of watching fake rape or trying to take some moral position. I'm saying: who the fuck sits through an hour of some dumbass shit to see another few minutes of a different kind of dumbass shit? And I get the exploitation movie culture, the midnight movie screenings, the, you went to see this because there was no Internet of it all. But this isn't exploitation, because if it was, shot one would have been some idiots doing some silly/funny/crazy stuff and shot two would have been rape, not shots one-through-three-thousand are hicks sitting in a place, shot three-thousand-one is rape, etc.

What makes this movie so much worse is that the first hour of bullshit / stupid payoff is just the setup for the second hour of bullshit / stupid payoff. This second half actually COULD HAVE been a movie because it has AN idea, but it is not a movie because no one here knows what a plot or a dialogue or a storyboard artist is. In this part the woman that got raped goes and gets revenge in pretty much the exact manner you'd expect, lot's of fake seduction and dick chopping.

Alright alright alright I wasted way too much time already but you can see the paradox there, where the feminist that would like the second half would have to sit through the raping half and the misogynist that would like the first half would have to sit through the dickless half. I highly doubt anyone who worked on this movie was even smart enough to understand THAT. This is very likely the worst movie I have ever seen. Do not watch it. You will be completely embarrassed, disgusted, and depressed to have done so.

Witchboard III: The Possesion - Yeah this is just dumb. It's about a haunted Ouija board, but it isn't even a little bit funny. Honestly this movie is a hole in my head. It's what I expect you would get if you removed the QTEs from a Sega CD FMV game. You are welcome for this gem:

The Stuff - Almost there. Almost done this review crop. Honestly these five (sans The Burning which is perfectly passable in its own right) are all candidates for worst movie ever made. It has to have been a horrible week or two for me when I was making my way through these. I blame Netflix. Alright well The Stuff is this B movie about some kind of ice cream substitute that can control people's brains, but in practice it's the same thing as They Live and has some completely unbearable acting. If you're not ready for a 11-year-old lead who doesn't know how to act, then you're not ready for this movie. Don't be. It's just bad directing and idea that seems neat but doesn't sustain a 90-minute feature film. No.

That was mostly depressing to write. Check back next time for some stuff that might be better?:

Jack's Back

Dead Snow

Night of the Comet

Not of this Earth

Barbarella

Mini-Movie-Mreviews! Perhaps a new feature?!

Have some extremely tiny reviews of a few movies I watched in the last couple weeks. You can get all of these on Netflix Instant Queue, and I got a dollar just for saying that! I hate numerical scores, so I'll give you a micro-recommendation at the end of each!

The House of the Devil - This 2009 indie movie has the feel of a student project; it runs as effectively an emulation of '70s proto-slasher horror. That means it's far more suspense than gore - you're kept as much in the dark as the film's babysitter protagonist and are taken on the thrill ride right beside here. A definite watch, especially for film geeks.

Small Soldiers - From the makers of Gremlins, it's a similarly dark satire of contemporary American commercial culture. This one focuses on violent and war-obsessed children's playthings. The commentary hits home, especially when the toys turn middle America into a war-zone, but one wonders who was the intended audience. Only the most jaded children would derive pleasure from the toys' homicidal antics or get the satire, and adults will yawn through the teenage love story. Of course, the great irony is that the movie came with a tie-in toy line. If you're bored and craving nostalgia, but keep those expectations low.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - A modest chiller from 2010ish with a haunting Lovecraftian premise that is unfortunately a bit too liberal with its CGI ghoulies. The atmosphere is thick but underutilized; scenes climax too quickly and you're never too far from a comfort zone. The characters don't offer much to grab onto, the filmmakers seemingly unwilling to take them too far from cliches. The focal little girl in particular is too close-mouthed yet the adults are ignoramuses thanks to the amount of coincidence they're willing to dismiss just to disbelieve her. Hardly necessary, unless you're looking for an adaptation of The Rats in the Walls.

Rare Exports - This was a GREAT movie. A completely deadpan blackly comic send-up of the Santa Claus myth that avoids the belligerent "I had a bad childhood" Scroogism of other dark Christmas films like Gremlins or Silent Night, Deadly Night. The R rating is an exaggeration - with the exception of a momentarily naked old man (yeuck), there's nothing in this movie worse than what kids are certainly watching in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. A combination of horror, fantasy, coming-of-age, and male-bonding flicks, the only reservation to a universal recommendation is that it is almost entirely in Finnish with subtitles. You're a prick if that stops you from watching though. Highly recommended for all viewers and all ages. Go watch it now.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky - Extremely weird Chinese '90s prison flick. I've heard it called a gateway drug to outsider gore films. Gory it is, with scenes rivaling even Dead Alive (Braindead) in creative carnage (one villain is so determined that he won't relinquish even when his stomach is ripped open and his innards are strewn on the floor. What happens next is... well I won't spoil it for you). And brain-dead it is as well - the plot is completely moronic, the budget non-existent, and the acting in no way deserving of being called acting. Plus it's got an awful dub. Might not want to be sober for this one, but it has to be seen to be believed. Cult film fans will love it.

That's enough for you to chew on for today. Come back next time to hear about:

Friday the 13th

The Burning

I Spit on Your Grave

Witchboard III: The Possesion

The Stuff

And many, many more!