I watched Wildwood NJ last night, and from the clips I saw I was expecting something a bit more wacky and free form like Heavy Metal Parking Lot, but it’s a lot more of a serious endeavor albeit with a couple memorable subjects and quotes.
It blew me away that it was from 94. I kept thinking it must be from like 89 or so. It wasn’t til the Taz tattoo showed up near the end that the date felt right.
thank u supergirl for reminding me of the single greatest piece of film criticism of the past decade
https://www.out.com/armond-white/2017/11/17/sexiest-movie-character-year
love u armond
Watched Tammy and the T-Rex, a very low-budget 1994 comedy about the titular Tammy (Denise Richards) having her boyfriend (Paul Walker) abducted by a Dr. Drakken/Shego-style mad scientist duo who saw out his brain and put it into a mechanical t-rex.
I kindaaaaaaaa loved it? I overall loved this movie I think!
(Note: Watch the more recent version with the gore added back in)
I was waffling on this near the start, because it is more or less a middling low-budget quirky comedy up until the brain comes out of the skull. Once that scene gets going, this movie becomes consistently unhinged and honestly very funny all the way through to the end.
This is the power of a good cast, a vicious eye for editing, and a willingness to play extremely fucking loose with a mid comedy script. Tammy and the T-Rex is all about the little moments scattered everywhere, the little gags they don’t focus on but are all over the place, the bizarre choices the actors make and the way no idea seemed to be left on the floor. That’s where the biggest laughs are to be found here.
Theo Forsett probably takes the crown as son-of-the-police-chief Byron, consistently getting the best lines and making the most relatable yet craziest choices. It’s also just nice to see a gay lead where the gag is not that he’s gay? There’s like one quick gag where the two dumb cop characters started to call him a f***** on the radio then realize they’re talking to his dad and abort the word halfway through, which killed me? Denise Richards seemed clearly cast for eye candy but she elevates Tammy a whole lot by becoming increasingly willing to do absolutely deranged shit as the plot flies apart, dipping into bimbo sometimes but then action hero other times, I liked the mix. The scene with Byron and Tammy are shopping for bodies for Michael at the morgue is in my eyes the best part of the movie. God.
I even thought Paul Walker was… fine! He’s fine! He occupies space in an inoffensive manner!
In fact, there is not a bad one in the bunch in this cast. The two cops get tons of great one-off lines (and some ADRed punch-up that I thought worked), the chief is competent and gets some funny eye-rolling-dad moments, and god, Terry Iser and Ellen Dubin as Dr. Wachenstein and Helga rock. I love a good, bitchy villain duo, they’re a lot of fun.
Liked this movie a whole lot more than I expected.
Movie rules. I am glad I picked it up as a blind buy on a Vinegar Syndrome sale years ago.
Seated for an indie film from seattle called Divine Hammer. The premise is about two terminally online girls conspiring to make a snuff film together. Heard rave reviews. Will respond with my immediate reaction
cutter’s way - i’d misremembered this one as playing a lot more on the identification of the killer as uncertain, unreliable - this time it feels more like it’s about the horrible feeling of a certainty you don’t know what to do about, it’s like a post-conspiracy thriller in the sense that the whole thing is set in that awkward phase between the excitement of discovery and some handwavey consequence. the feeling of hearing one of the worst guys you know go all in on a paranoid rant and that they’re pretty much right, that any caveat or nuance you could try to add would just feel like an attempt to wiggle out of thinking too much about it. lisa eichhorn is so good in it, it’s crazy to look up what else she was in and find most of it is like, sinbad vehicle “first kid” and an episode of “swamp thing: the series”
la confidential - felt a bit suffocated by the glossy period trappings, it’s funny how much the three person structure makes it feel like a videogame. investigate the crime using [FISTS], [SMARTS] or [CHARM]!! your approach will lead to consequences as you play!! fuck la noire, this should have been one of those ps2 games like shellshock nam 67 where you spend your crime points in the lab to unlock gun upgrades and pinup pictures of people made up to resemble the black dahlia
devil in a blue dress - kind of earnest at first and there’s also something strange about watching a period piece pulp noir throwback where women DON’T turn out to be evil… but midway through easy starts making increasingly crazed decisions like someone stuck in a Westworld simulation universe trying to find out what the limits are, and there’s a giddy feeling in everybody else trying to catch up. whenever mouse isn’t onscreen everyone should be saying “where’s mouse?” and they kind of do!
This is exactly it. Jeff Bridges has a good thing going and then his weirdo buddy has to ruin it all because he has nothing better to do and is seeking self-destruction with dignity, in turn forcibly dignifying Jeff Bridges’ vacuous and hedonistic life by making him take up the gauntlet.
black dahlia for the ps2 would go extremely hard. the de palma movie was shot in like Bulgaria and all the digitally added 1940s LA backgrounds look insane. it looks like those poirot movies everyone said had extreme fmv energy
I’m glad you said fuck la noire. they wish that irish guy was Dudley Smith so bad
Favorite instance of this is the quintessential Los Angeles novel Ask the Dust having its film adaptation shot in Cape Town
Pokémon—Zoroark: Master of Illusions
I think I figured out where the names Zoroark and Zorua came from: From the prophet Zoroaster, who believed the world was divided into truth and illusion. As pokemon they cast illusions, so it’s almost appropriate except they are coded as good in the way most pokemon are innately and also in the plot of the movie.
I played Pokemon White and White 2 before this movie, and raised a Zorua into a level 100 Zoroark. It’s very interesting as a design because it’s red-black colored, which is power and dominance and vitality, but also it has many features archetypical of the Kitsune of legends. But only the Zorua, the first stage pokemon, has any particular trickster attributes or habits. The Zoroark casts illusions but not out of preference or mentality.
This movie didn’t really add much to my understanding of the pokemon. To me, it’s relation to N in Pokemon White and White 2, in particular the ambiguity over whether N at the end of White 2 is actually N or a Zoroark, and the fact that it’s a dark type pokemon coded as unlawful, associated with what is basically a prophet of the series, who is misused by others in a complicated conflict about ideology, power, and truth… that means something to me in a very weird way. And also the episode that I’ve never even watched but heard about where a Zoroark pretends to be a Nurse Joy and keeps running a black market Pokemon Center.
I don’t know. The movies aren’t very good. The games contain a lot of intriguing elements but all of that is broadly suggestive rather than containing any meaning within itself. I’m starting to like a lot of different media for suggesting ideas that it doesn’t contain. That’s sort of the quintessential schizophrenic mentality, but in my opinion you can, in fact, have media that has all the components of a meaning without assembling them, and that’s a perfectly fine way to enjoy the media.
Divine Hammer was fantastic. Ultra low budget tribute to the shot on video slashers of the 80’s and early 90’s. Directed by 2 first time directors (also sisters), Divine Hammer is about two terminally online young women, who after meeting in a discord call while searching for lost media gore videos, decide to make a snuff film together.
I could talk about a lot of different angles of the film, but because the film is so far aways away from a digital, physical, or wide release I’d rather keep the plot under wraps. What I will say is i love how it commented the community aspect of being into niche media. When you are into obscure shit, you can only really talk to people who are into the same obscure shit about it.
Speaking of which,
I got to briefly chat with one of the directors (Mae. M) after the screening ended and recommend Snuff, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, and Vulcanizadora. I feel all those films contain some of the same primordial embers as Divine Hammer but all taken to radically different directions
Watched Lord of Illusions. Basically the entire movie is driven by people committing catastrophic unforced errors due to what I would broadly consider impossible psychology. This is up there with the police training video about the danger of knives where a woman is cutting herself and praising Satan at her homemade skull shrine and the police enter the house illegally and shoot her for turning to face them. But due to decent production value and I guess never explicitly endorsing Christian folk concepts of evil, it’s like it has the same highly contrived evil but without any motive for it, or any metaphysical necessity for it. The result is that it endorses magic as a danger that drags emotionally dysfunctional and psychopathic people towards it, a pure chaos simmering behind the veil of reality, but it’s just a matter of fact sort of thing. I guess the hero gets dragged into it despite himself.
The only thing that made sense in this movie was the narration in the beginning, which says that almost all magic is illusion, except for an entirely useless churn beneath the surface of reality which is antagonistic to all life and value which allows some real but trivial power. That one simple concept is generic enough to keep the movie going until about 2/3rds of the way through, at which point the script realizes there is no logical way to progress towards the climax, so it undoes the logic of every previous decision, including many that weren’t in focus until now, then gets the protagonists to the final conflict. And this is the most bizarre part: the bad guy was shot in the head and left buried alive for decades. He could have limbered up and said “You shot me in the head and left me buried alive for decades” and he would have had motivation. That plus the wanting to “purge the world” thing. But instead he literally says “I decided not to be a God but instead to be a creature of rotting flesh. I will show the world that reality is bad. Also I am a homosexual. This is my motivation.”
So yes, this entire movie is unforced errors and impossible psychology fighting itself to the finish line with the help of good makeup and bad digital effects. This is like, what if baptist occult paranoia were “taken seriously” by an idiot with a budget. It’s trying to get away from it’s only context and the result is meaningless. Just shock value.
Nirvana the band the show the movie. Loved it, wish I could track down the tv show now that the archive dot org stuff is gone.
Talladega Nights is a more realistic NASCAR film than Days Of Thunder.
Holy shit Days of Thunder fuckin stinks. Half the movie is hospital scenes. Tom Cruise sexually harasses Nicole Kidman. This is a movie for very very stupid people. Everyone and everything is covered in grease or sweat. Hans Zimmer does the soundtrack and it also stinks. The racing also sucks.
I watched a 40 year old CBS adaptation of Murders in the Rue Morgue starring George C. Scott as Dupin and Val Kilmer as his plucky assistant. It is pretty funny to imagine that George C. Scott is French. His Dupin is a retired police inspector who has to be lectured out of the doldrums by his daughter, who’s in turn engaged to the guy they’ve arrested for the titular murders. You know the fiance didn’t do it because he’s not a monkey, and this is the oldest detective story, you already know it ends with a monkey. Scott gets worked up fewer times than you’d hope on the way to the monkey, but he does threaten to crush Ian McShane’s skull at one point. Yes, it’s too long and dull for something that’s building up to “a monkey did it,” but it’s a CBS tv movie. I don’t know what I expected. The monkey suit is better than I hoped for (I mean I wish it was worse).
I was taken by unknown forces with the need to find and rewatch some fever dream movies I saw back in 2004.
Basically, I had just graduated from high school, and my uncle, who is a cruel inscrutable asshole, was somehow thus required to get me a gift. All he knew about me is that I liked scifi bullshit, because I one time watched Babylon 5: Thirdspace at his house, because this was in the days when it just aired at a time and you had to catch it then or never see it. He really really really disliked that admittedly mid TV movie and declared all sci-fi a “waste of time” and kind of just didn’t like me (a teenager) forever after that.
Thus, when he needed to get me a gift, he picked up a two-pack of DVDs at the shelves near the counter at Blockbuster - one made-for-Scifi Channel movie by David Jackson, and one that was in fact TWO Philip J. Cook movies in one. I thanked him and looked at this strange offering as he left to argue with my mom.
The two-in-one DVD contained two Scifi Channel movies produced by Cook’s company, Antibody and Despiser. The other was called Do or Die.
Having now finished rewatching all three (they were up on youtube), I was unsurprised to find two of these were exactly as forgettable as I remembered. The third one, though…
Despite my love of the bio-shooter Lifeforce I get really squicked out by inner body adventure stuff. I’m better about it now than I was, but I could not get through even Innerspace as a kid. I couldn’t get through the Magic School Bus ep. I just found the concept of one person being within your body in a decidedly non-sexy way very unsettling, and of course everything at that scale is trying to kill you for Nutrients:tm:.
So I went into this movie with a fair amount of dread. I wasn’t not going to watch a movie that had my boi Lance Hendrikson in it, and this was in the era where if you got a DVD you just watched it, because it movies were a limited commodity, but I wasn’t expecting to like it.
Turns out? I didn’t like it for completely different unrelated reasons: It is Scifi Channel slop, none of the effects even remotely put you into the place like, say, Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace did, and you continuously notice odd little (kind of charming) details that pull you out of the story, like how the keycode panels are the calculator I owned at the time that opens up when you press a release button, or how there are three sets in the entire film.
Hendrikson plays this ridiculously hard-assed bomb expert, a true professional all the way through, never breaking character or giving it any less mustard for being a shovelware fake movie. I respect that man’s work ethic. Basically a terrorist for a generic faction has planted a nuclear bomb in a city and the detonator is in his brain? And microscopic? So that if he dies the bomb goes off. He of course gets shot during the raid where they take him so they put the comotose guy on life support and shrink down a team and inject him in, but they get followed through by a skin mite, which is the monster of the movie. This mite wants them fucking DEAD.
They go through some CG bullshit and eventually reach the detonator and do some surgery to disarm it. Meanwhile, the team gets jumped by this giant mite who uses its proboscus to stab through the glass and spear the pilot, like some demonic beast thirsting for only death and nothing else. One of the craft blows itself up and takes out the mite, and they are able to disarm the detonator and escape.
As you might expect, there’s no stunts, the story is nothing, the characters are cartoons, and there’s a crazy disconnect between the actors and the CG. I don’t think we’ll ever see an era again where the actors literally just sit on their asses while CG shit happens around them. It’s so remarkably low-energy, like we’re watching people who were watching TV, filmed, then composited into an adventure that doesn’t really need them to react. New, dumb trails were being blazed in this era.
Fuck me, man. Obviously, not good, but there were a few nuggets of possibility.
The story I think has a little bit of potential if done right: There is a Virus That Makes You Old, where every day is one year of age. The world has divided itself into the Infected and the Clean. The Infected get a daily dose of a medicine manufactured by The One Evil Company, which keeps the effects away and lets them live a relatively normal life, though the Infecteds are second-class citizens with no rights. People in the cities work shitty 9 to 5s and can’t possibly push back on anything they are required to do, or they don’t get the drug. Even so, the drug always has shortages and people are just kind of fucked.
The main lady gets pregnant with her beloved, a guy who gets into an altercation in the alleyway and has his secret injector damaged during the struggle, which reveals that he’s an Infected. Infecteds can’t infect Cleans, it can only be passed from mother to baby. For reasons the movie does not explain, the husband - now with his injector damaged - rapidly becomes Old in the span of three minutes, then dies. The lady, distraught, realizes that this means her baby will be born Infected (though she is Clean) and this leads her to the Bluelands (the drug is blue) where society has collapsed and the Infecteds seem to exclusively do raids on trucks transporting the blue anti-Old drug.
The highlight for this was this fucking insane scene where she has a nightmare where he deceased husband that she loved menaces her by screaming “GIVE ME! A BABY!” until she births a BLUE DEMON BABY WITH YELLOW GLOWING EYES AAAAAAAAAA
And a different scene where the hard-assed leader of the rebels administers the drug to the their infiltrator and it’s like… meant to be titillating I think? She’s like “yeah… I liked it when Jack gave it to me too…”
It kinda of drags for most of it but I did like the villain. The reveal that he’s secretly been an Infected is the most obvious possible thing, and the way they cure the virus is pretty absurd in how easy it is. But, I overall found this pretty watchable, and sometimes it would even commit to its world and do some body horror. After Antibody, I was ready to declare it better than the Cook movie for sure.
But how wrong I was…
Okay this one RIPS.
I intend to do a showing of this movie in the near future to some SB folk, maybe even at SB Con. It’s remarkably fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeeSsY2oak8
Like Soultaker before it, Despiser tells the tale of a responsible and mild-mannered cracker who works as a graphic designer.
After pulling a late night, he is fading on the drive home, and is jolted into action to dodge two CG children running across a thin highway bridge at 11:30pm in the dead of night. They’re not ghosts or anything, they’re just very young kids playing on the highway. He plows through the barrier and plummets three stories into a lake, dying on impact, and being SEND VIA HELL TUNNEL to Purgatory.
When this man arrives in Purgatory, the movie does not slow down a single fucking moment. He battles cultists, bombs around the dark haunted CG countryside with his Toyota Camery, and quickly joins up with a ragtag group of lost souls including a battle preacher, a WW2 Kamikaze ace pilot, a woman who genuinely changes her accent every line, and a cowboy. They have all been here since their deaths too.
It is impossible to overstate how far beyond their means Cook was shooting here. They literally had a warehouse space and 4 days, they filmed every physical thing they could, building shitty little tops to buildings or walls for them to break through, or tunnels of PVC piping, whatever the fuck they could. It was then all sent to their ONE EDITOR who LEGIT “FIXED IT IN POST” by building an entire CG movie around these chucklefucks.
It feels like Tim and Eric and it feels like Tribulation Force. It has the pacing and the tone of a SciFi Channel movie. It has nothing whatsoever to say, it’s just pure gun-running car-exploding action.
I don’t think I’ve seen a movie this thoroughly entertaining in a very long time. I cannot believe I forgot about this movie! I think it was maybe a matter of too many kickass things happening too frequently for my brain to remember any one of them! And I certainly never rewatched the movie, or even talked to people about it. I recall watching all three of these in one night, and this being the last one, and I may have fallen asleep during it. Remarkable mistake on my part.
I dug around a little and saw that there is a great little behind-the-scenes on the movie, which I encourage all to watch (though there are spoilers). This is a very inspiring flick in that, Cook had very very little way to accomplish any of what he wanted, and he compromised on nothing, and presumably only through the inhuman effort of the editor did this get over the finish line. I really hope he was paid well, he’s the star of the movie.
Killer flick. Cook never did another thing of note. He’s trying to Kickstart a sequel but I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
So, I very unfortunately DOOOO need to hand it to my asshole uncle for legitimately giving me a great gift that day. He got extremely lucky, but he did me a great kindness that day and he deserves a teeny bit of recognition for blind firing at the target and pinging a bullseye here.
Finally got around to seeing Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie and trying to unpick why I didn’t like it more… Maybe some combination of impossible to meet expectations after years of the show being cancelled and just being too familiar with how the sausage is made. Felt like I spent most of the film seeing all the seams… but, I dunno, maybe the film itself was little too preoccupied with escalating things to the point of distraction as well (so many vfx shots!). Found myself missing the meandering pace of the show, a more crapshoot approach over a shorter runtime adds an extra charm, I guess? I suppose if the success of the movie paves the way for more episodes of the show, I’ll finally get some confirmation on whether it’s an issue of scale and not that the formula itself has just run its course… I really wanted to like it more!
Was not expecting Obsession to remind me of Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing. Maybe every movie where the male lead turns out to be a rapist does though.
bad timing mentioned… i guess i will bend the knee to finding out what obsession is… you got me…
