Movie Scum

Written by: PBF So, in case you haven’t noticed, I have been on a cheesy horror kick lately. Since Jesusflix has the entire Phantasm franchise, I figured I might as well revisit that. While I would substitute “low budget, but decent” for “cheesy” in regard to the first Phantasm , I would apply the phrase, “utter disappointment” to this installment. Phantasm II has us watching Liz thumb through a journal, talking to herself in her head, about Mike, whom she has only seen in her dreams. While she is doing this, the film cuts away to the end of the first Phantasm, with Mike and Reggie relaxing after the ordeal that they have just gone through. The flashback reminds us that they decide to hit the road and get a fresh start. However, things go awry when the Tall Man attempts to take Mike and turn him in to a dwarf slave, but is thwarted by Reggie who ultimately blows the house up, but not with the Tall Man inside. We flash forward a bit, and Mike is being released from a mental insti...

False advertising is a big deal when it comes to businesses and consumer products. The laws on the books act to protect consumers against being misled about the product or service they are buying from inflated claims, inaccurate results, or overall deception. The United States even has the FTC, a government agency whose primary purpose is to protect buyers from all kinds of shenanigans. Why am I talking about this? Well, I am angry that there is no entertainment based equivalent to the FTC which would prevent unsuspecting movie goers from shelling out money on crap films. When I saw The Crazies this weekend, attached to the print was a new trailer for the upcoming Nightmare on Elm Street remake. As I previously worried based on the test screening reviews, this remake could very well suck balls and destroy my own personal, nostalgic 80s universe by further bastardizing the franchise already undone by the likes of Freddy’s Dead and Freddy vs. Jason. But, as I sat in the darkened movie ...

Written by: Digger I’ll be the first to admit that I love movies with car chases, explosions, big rubber monsters, and boobies, but every now and again I need a change of pace. Call it an escape from escapism. Some real life stories are worth experiencing just as much as fantasy, and everyone should learn about the man, the myth, the real life legend that is Harvey Pekar. American Splendor is the movie I watch to remind myself that for all the brainless Michael Bay boom-fests and boring vampire meat market movies out there, a film can still be a work of art. Now, I know what you’re thinking, or at least what I’m thinking, but artsy movie doesn’t always mean boring, self-indulgent pile of crap, and some directors need to learn the difference. (I’m looking at you, Vincent Gallo) The film opens with images of kids trick-r-treating on Halloween dressed as comic book superheroes like Superman and Batman, but one kid is dressed in his mild-mannered garb. When a house-wife distributin...

Just days after we release an episode criticizing the prevalance of remakes in Hollywood, this gut-buster comes in and proves that we should just have a big tall glass of Shut-the-F-Up Juice and give the film a chance before crying foul about its origins. In fairness, PBF and I commented that this looked like a rather kick-ass movie which we had high hopes for. I am happy to report, along with many other reviews I’ve seen, that it does not disappoint.

Now THIS is the movie I was looking for! A low-budget, horribly-acted, crap movie to sit and just stare at in amazement. The amazement is born in the terrible plot, forged by lackluster direction, and cemented in the god-awful looking effects. To its credit though, Dragon Wars (or D-War as the cool kids would have called it if anyone else but me had seen this piece of trash) kept me entertained for a good ninety minutes. That’s more than I can say about many other films. The plot (and I use the term as loosely as possible) centers around the strife between a good dragon and a bad dragon. Now, I spaced out during part of the exposition but from what I gathered, the bad dragon wants to have something that is for whatever reason stored inside a specific person every 500 years in order to rule the earth or get to heaven or something like that. During about 78% of the movie, this person is Sarah, played by Amanda Brooks, who was born with a birthmark in the exact and defined shape of a ...

Reports are coming in that Andrew Koenig , son of Star Trek’s Walter Koenig, was found dead in Canada. Andrew played possibly one of the best named characters on a show whose main star was a devout Christian in real life, Boner Stabone, on Growing Pains. His father is reporting that it was an apparent suicide, but the cause of death has yet to be officially determined. Read more at the random news site I decide to link in this sentence.

Written by: PBF You've heard the phrase "Hugs not drugs," right? Well, I urge you not to heed that advice. I am not advocating the use of drugs by any means, but just beware of hugging. Allow me to explain. The Children is a delightful waste of time that begins at a nuclear power plant. The only 2 employees that are there must go find a drink so they leave. I assume that they have neglected something in their job description as some kind of leak happens and a big toxic fog forms. We then have a bus full of about 5 kids, having a merry time, singing the praises of the bus driver who approaches the dense mysteriously out of place fog with reckless abandon, and goes right through it. Later on, Sheriff Billy Hart finds the bus on the side of the road, engine running, but empty. The Sheriff then visits the parents of the missing kids to see if they have come home. They have not. What they have done, is turned into some kind of mindless gang of zombies, whose fingernails...

Pop quiz! When I say Michael Crichton what’s the first movie that comes to mind? Jurassic Park ? Nice job! Twister ? Not too bad! Sphere ? Congo ? Now you’re just messing with me. If you did not think of his smashing directorial success Runaway , I wouldn’t be surprised. This is such an old favorite of mine that I’ve never heard anyone else even acknowledge (excepting PBF who probably saw in theaters). A 1984 movie about killer robots? How original! Oh wait. Terminator didn’t have Tom Selleck’s mustache though. Taking place “in the future” or some weird alt-history 1980s, Tom Selleck ’s Jack Ramsey is head of the runaway squad, a group of police who deal with industrial and household robots that misbehave. Things start off rather uneventful until a servant robot decides to dice up two people and hold an infant hostage at gunpoint. Ramsey discovers the robot was purposely tasked to go off the handle by the over-the-top Gene Simmons to eliminate an engineer who developed the compu...

I was very disappointed in Exorcist II , the obvious follow up to William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist . My aggravation with the movie though is likely different than the rumored reactions of audiences during the film’s premiere. Commissioned by PBF while reviewing Netflix’s awesome Watch Instantly collection, I went into the film expecting it to be quite horrid based on my readings of previous reviews about the film. Normally, I try not to have any preconceived notions about a film prior to watching it as sometimes it can be hard to separate what you’ve heard from what you actually see in the film itself. I am happy to report though that all of the bashers of the film hit it dead on. Taking place four years after the original, Reagan (played by a remarkably cute Linda Blair ) is undergoing psychiatric treatment to deal with repressed memories of her possession. During a really stupid looking hypnosis treatment, she is intertwined with Father Lamont who is investigating th...

Written by: Digger Peter Jackson's directorial career has been one strange roller-coaster ride. I became aware of his work in the late 1990's when I and several of my friends discovered his early gore-fest movie Dead Alive (also titled Braindead ) and became instant fans. My classmates in high school were always yelling lines like "He's got, THE BITE!" in between classes. It was like the first drop on a rickety old wooden monster of a coaster; rough, and a little nauseating, but a hell of a lot of fun. After that I road the shaky turns of Bad Taste and The Frighteners still enjoying every minute. Then, in 2001, I sped into the smooth, polished, metal loops of a whole different monster with The Fellowship of the Ring . Don't get me wrong, it was still a great ride, just a different kind of ride. After that trilogy concluded, the coaster started to slow down with Jackson's somewhat underwhelming remake of King Kong and then the coaster sunk i...

Written by: PBF Phantasm is bad ass and piss poor at the same time. But it is a good kind of piss poor. Jody and Mike are brothers who have lost their parents. Mike is younger, 13. Not wanting to be alone, he follows his brother everywhere. Mike follows Jody to a funeral of his friend Tommy, and sees the funeral director, who is simply called the Tall Man, pick up Tommy’s coffin by himself and put it back in the hearse rather than bury it. This suspicious activity, coupled with odd visions and noises, start to freak Mike out, and in standard horror movie fashion, his brother doesn’t believe that these things are actually happening. Well, until Mike shows him a severed finger in a box. The two (along with Reggie, an ice cream man) discover that the Tall Man is taking bodies, bringing them back to life as dwarf slaves, and taking them to another planet. The gateway to this planet is in a room in the mortuary and is between 2 sliver poles. Yeah that’s right. Didn’t see that coming,...

Written by: PBF I bet if I were to poll a small group of people, and ask them to list 5 or so Ben Stiller films, Permanent Midnight would probably not be on many of those lists. It does not follow the usual mildly amusing, wafer thin plot, same character in every film formula that Stiller employs. He plays a heroin addict. Ben Stiller plays Jerry Stahl, a real person, who wrote the book Permanent Midnight, a memoir of his descent in to and climb out of heroin addiction. This film is of course, based on that book. Stahl has written for the television shows Alf, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, Moonlighting and CSI among others. In fact, he wrote the 100th episode of CSI, which is apparently is regarded as one of the best episodes of that series. He also wrote the screenplay for Bad Boys II . The time period of this film takes place when he was working on Alf and Twin Peaks. That being said, the film is a glimpse in to that part of his life, in which at some point he has a $6000 a ...