Could this poster get any cooler?

I should really change the name of our site to “Alex shows you why the only movies you ever really need to see were made from about 1979 to 1989.”  That’s not true, because some great movies came out before and after that decade long window, but the more and more I dig into the movies I love that may have fallen by the wayside, the more and more I realize they all seem to be either made, or have strong ties, to that time frame.  The Wraith is another one of these rubies, and better yet, one I don’t see spoken about often or reviewed enough (or very well, for that matter) on the internet.  So what is this flick all about?  Glad you asked.

The Wraith is a new spin on the tried and true ghost/spirit revenge tale.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies where someone is wrongfully murdered, and then a spectral version of them self comes back in order to exact vengeance on those who did him or her wrong.    What you probably haven’t seen is, what if that victim came back with a Dodge Turbo Interceptor, and used his car to kill those who “Road Pirates” who killed him and continue terrorize the small Arizona town they live in?  Sounds kind of badass right?  It totally is, and here’s why.

Suck it Knight Rider.

The first rule of making a car-centric (or Car Porn, for those of you gear-heads out there) movie, besides having some sexy looking cars to film, is that you film the cars well while they are moving.  In recent years, computer graphics, models and copious other cop out special effects have replaced elaborate pyrotechnics and stunt drivers, but The Wraith spares us that sub-video game graphic quality and non-sense for some no-bullshit car chases, races, and massive, multiple angle explosions.  Director Mike Marvin shows a lot of competence and confidence while he makes sweet cinematic love to the fleet of vehicles he has at his disposal, and every race and chase is filmed very well, even if they are a bit on the short side.  Even with short actions sequences, the movie is built around the set pieces, meaning to say that you never go more than 15 minutes or so before something is getting blown up or shot at.  Marvin still manages to let the characters be fleshed out enough to care about by meshing the action with character development, with special attention given towards Keri Johnson (the damsel in distress), Packard Walsh (played brilliantly by actor-turned-director Nick Cassavetes, director of such steaming piles of shit like John Q, The Notebook, and Alpha Dog), and Jake Kesey (played by a stunt driver in an awesome black leather suit mostly, and when he is out of the suit, it’s Charlie Sheen.)  Mike Marvin seemed hellbent on turning Nick Cassavetes into a legitimate action bad guy movie star, as he shines throughout as just a miserable bastard of a villain, but one who is pretty smart and intimidating in an unconventionally stylish and almost classy way.  The scene that pushes him over the edge, and shows Mike Marvin at his actor-driven-scene best is when Packard forces his girlfriend/”property”, Keri Johnson, to cut his hand to show that they are “Blood Lovers.”  When Marvin isn’t giving little peeks into the everyday world of the road pirates or Keri, he is making the best of the picturesque south-western scenery and really knocking the race and chase scenes out of the park with simple but highly effective camera angles that are usually filming slightly upward at the cars, in order to give that a “bigger than life” quality and a greater sense of speed and pure muscle.

Insert General Motors joke here.

Since I already bled into a critique of what you can expect from the acting, I will cheat a bit here and sum it up by saying that if you know how to take 80′s acting on the chin, and laugh a bit WITH it, instead of at it, you won’t have any problems sitting through The Wraith.  On a whole, the acting is above par from what I remembered it being the first time I saw this (which was when I was like 12, and I saw it on a Sunday afternoon on WB 11 New York or something like that) and again, the true standout is Nick Cassavetes as the absolutely insufferable and demented Packard Walsh.  Oh, and Clint Howard lends his…big hair, crazy glasses, and general geekdom to this flick as well, and Clint is always worth mentioning.  Randy Quaid has something between a cameo and a bit part as one Detective Loomis (a nod to Halloween?) and does what Randy Quaid normally does; be kinda weird and off putting and not play much of a factor in the likability of any movie in particular.

Seriously Clint, what the fuck is going on with those glasses and that hair. That doesn't "just happen" to a guy, right?

The real stars of the show, as you probably guessed by the story synopsis, are the special effects and the cars.  Now, before somebody jumps down my throat, I am not a guy car.  I know one car in the film is a Turbo Interceptor, because that’s what people called it in the movie.  There was also a Cuda.  That’s about what I know.  What I do know, is the cars we all very distinguishable, looked very cool and seemed to go really fast, and that was really all I cared about.  The races, as I mentioned earlier, are somewhat on the short sort and somewhat samey, but the fact that they usually end in explosions or some massive crash makes them much more entertaining.  The explosions are ridiculously big, the warehouse explosion and the final crash explosion in particular, but it adds to the quality of the revenge that is so deservedly being dealt out by our black clad, Spas-12 shotgun wielding, Turbo Interceptor driving hero.  The natural lighting that prevails through much of the film gives the movie a much more realistic and gritty look, like you can almost feel the sand and dirt kicking up around these four-wheeled mayhem machines.  The south west is the perfect place to film a movie based around cars and crashes, and the locale certainly glimmers here.  When we aren’t seeing the small Arizon town in the daytime, heavy blues and purples help to give the nighttime a other worldly feel, especially when The Wraith shows up.  As far as the auido department goes, the sound is spot on, and the soundtrack has some Billy Idol, Ozzy Osbourne, Robert Palmer, and Motley Crue in it when the synthy score isn’t just moseying around.

Now might be a good time to run.

The Wraith must be taken in by someone who can enjoy a fair amount of very minor flaws that come with any film that is dated beyond 20 years.  That being said, it is a highly enjoyable, very watchable (visually, it still has some impressive moments), and an impressively unique take on an age old film formula that sees the victim getting one last go at those who did him in.  The “Road Pirates” give it a bit of a modern day Mad Max feel, but The Wraith taps into more of a spacey vibe that anything.  The universe itself has rejected the death of the young, innocent, and unjustly murdered man and have sent him back to Earth with a bitchin’ all black leather racing suit, racing helmet with tinted visor, and a sweet fucking car with one mission.  Kick.  Major.  Ass.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Actor Lance Hayward will make a comeback even if it kills you!

Wow. I couldn’t find a bad review of this movie, and I went looking for them after I watched it. Too bad I didn’ t look it up before watching it, but I fell victim to my pathological love for anything 80s.

Granted, most of the reviews were about Skinemax scream queen Michelle Bauer’s full frontal and Jamie Summers’s boobs, but naked women are supposed to be a fun part of a horror movie, not a means to distract the viewer from the fact that about a third of the movie is missing. Or maybe in this case that is why they were naked.

This movie had a good concept. Retarded teenagers break into a Hollywood mansion the night before it is to be demolished and die exactly like characters in the former owner’s movies. The deaths are pretty great, I have to say.  Not ten minutes into the movie a guy gets his hands tied to a tree and his feet tied to his own car bumper and we get a great shot of his torso coming apart while his head screams.

The problem is that someone somewhere thought the concept of incorporating silent films into the movie was a literal one. Every death is intercut with shots of fake posters from the fake movies and stock footage of real movies where a character uses the same weapon that is being used to kill the slasher fodder kids. Combined with the ginormous plotholes and the fact that the stock footage padding still only gives us a running time of 80 minutes I have to wonder if this is one of those movies that was finished with a different crew WAAAAY after shooting began, or maybe there was a terrible accident and footage was lost forever. Oh, and there are three screenwriters credited, which is never a good sign.

So if any of you who liked this movie will indulge me, I have a few questions. Is the killer the ghost of Lance Hayward, and if so, why does he walk from his mansion and break into a house to kill the last two survivors? Couldn’t he just appear wherever he wanted? How did the survivors get home? Why are they eating a cake in the next shot after they escape the mansion leaving all their dead friends behind? What happened to the entire next day after the murders? How does the ghost know which house to walk to, and what is the deal with the collie he leads around?

Another feature of this piece of crap is its overuse of old B movie actors like Alan Hale, Aldo Ray and Dan Haggerty (credited here as Daniel). The only cameo actor who does anything, other than get off work early or die, is the cop played by Cameron Mitchell, and can you really call any work he does a cameo? I don’t think that man ever turned down an acting job.  How does Mitchell know to show up at the house where the two survivors are eating cake, and why does he scream at the final girl that he wants to see her face and her eyes? Why is there surveillance outside the house who do nothing at all when a guy crashes through a window and gets skewered by a white picket fence?

I have to give this a three, unfortunately, for all the nakedness and gore, but it would have gotten a four if the makers had cared about anything other than quick money from rentals. This would have been a great choice for one of our group reviews. Much better than the Baron and the Demons, not as good as Humanoids From the Deep.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

"Get Your Heart Broken" Certainly a nominee for best tag line of 2009, and maybe of all time.

When I heard that the powers that be in Hollywood were remaking My Bloody Valentine, I actually WASN’T all that upset.  The Original MBV (see our dual review here!) is a GREAT 80′s style slasher flick that was unfortunately largely overlooked due to the genre being over saturated with soulless clones.  Even though the original still holds up amazingly well, and the recently released uncut version adds a  lot more bite from a gore and brutality standpoint, it feels dated enough to warrant a….”heartfelt” (see what I did there?) remake.  Fortunately for old school slasher fans, the remake does a decent job of retelling the story of Harry Warden, while staying true to many of the devices that made the original so memorable and sought after.

“Tom returns to his hometown on the tenth anniversary of the Valentine’s night massacre that claimed the lives of 22 people. Instead of a homecoming, however, Tom finds himself suspected of committing the murders, and it seems like his old flame is the only one will believes he’s innocent.”~IMDB

Harry Warden does NOT fuck around.

So we have a small mining town, tucked away in the middle of “the land time forgot” America.  Great, because we all know those are the safest places when the town tries to hide a secret.  Anyway, what little plot that imdb synopsis doesn’t fill you in on, the opening credits do.  Is it just me, or does anyone else LOVE IT when the opening credits are actually useful?  It seems like such a waste to just have some music playing and credits and titles going.  MBV already gets a bonus half star for not wasting my fucking time by having me listen to a lackluster score while they rattle off names of actors and actresses who are in the movie for 30 seconds.  We are off to a great start.

Speaking of actors and actresses, MBV manages to avoid a major pitfall that sinks many of the remakes us horror fans have had to endure over the last decade; casting.  Jamie King, known for her titillating role in Sin City, does a fine job as being our “main girl” ala Laurie Strode.  She brings a morsel of nuance to her character, and also doesn’t just rely on looking slutty and screaming, but I suppose that is because she is one of the young female stars of Hollywood who can actually act, which is paradoxically why she doesn’t a ton of work. (Who needs an attractive female lead who can act? Pfft, just be a mannequin like Megan Fox.  Since I’m on the topic, fuck Megan Fox.  Bitch seriously looks and acts like an android.) As for leading men, we get Jensen Ackles from the popular Buffy rip-off show Supernatural, and Kerr Smith who is a noted TV drama (Yup, he was on Dawsons Creek for spell!) actor.  They do an OK job of fighting over the affections of Jamie Kings characters and driving the narrative forward, but ultimately there roles are not only secondary, but right on the verge of expendable.  There are better suited actors for these roles, but I guess the casting called for the females to get some good looking guys to look at too, so we are stuck with these dolts.  On the upside TOM MOTHERFUCKING ATKINS is in this movie, being as gruff, ancient, and downright legendary as he always is.  If you don’t know who Tom Atkins is, kill yourself.  Buy a gun, crash your car, drink crystal drano, whatever you gotta do to get the job done.  I kid, I kid.  But seriously, Tom Atkins is horror royalty, mostly thanks to his monumental performance in Night of the Creeps.

I HEART YOU TOM ATKINS!

Patrick Lussier, horror director…semi-extraordinaire, is at the helm for this one.  He is responsible for a long list of mostly “meh” horror movies such as Halloween H20, Cursed, Red Eye, The Eye, and White Noise 2: The Light. (which is MUCH better than White Noise 1, and highly recommended by me as a great little ghost story flick starring Nathan Fillion)  Lussier seems to capture both the best in him and the worst with MBV.  What I mean by that is, one moment he is staging and filming a great little stalk-and-kill sequence, while the next he hovers from a helicopter, shooting the same fucking bridge we have seen in the movie 6 times already.  We get it Lussier, we are in a small town with one bridge leading into it, we haven’t left, give us a damn break with the establishing shots already.  Lussier, I’m sure, was having fun with the possibilities laid before him with 3-D aspects, but still, some shots seem to linger on much longer than necessary, and some really feel like a complete waste of time.  The movie clocks in at 1 hour and 41 minutes, and surely Lussier could have shaved 11 minutes worth of bullshit of it if he wasn’t so concerned with 3-d shots that linger and and footage of ONE FRIGGIN’ BRIDGE.  Besides his love of arching, over water infrastructure, Lussier does show some flair when it comes to his kills, which are thankfully clearly shot, defined, and incredibly grisly.  Some of these kills are hall of fame quality, and they are deserve to be rewound at least once to see how truly brutal they are.  For a slasher movie, as long as the director films the kills good, everything else can be a distant second as far as I am concerned.  It just hurts when someone directs a SLASHER movie, but doesn’t know dick about filming a murder.  Lussier passes, but only with about a C+/B-.

Maybe not as iconic as a William Shatner Mask painted white, or a Hockey Mask, but if I saw this fucker coming my way, I would be running in the opposite direction.

From a technical standpoint, MBV is a great looking and sounding movie.  The cinematography is crystal clear, and the aforementioned establishing shots look really good, all 81 times we see them.  There are also some shots in the mine and surrounding wooded area that feel really alive.  The use of color here is sometimes surprisingly vivid.  The sound is also nice, nothing revolutionary, but nothing to complain about either, which is always a major plus.  Also, no bullshit teeny-bopper-dick-sucking soundtrack.  No Nickelback.  No Creed.  No Avenged Sevenfold.  Just a nice, relatively tense score that amps up at the appropriate times.  It is really refreshing when the first thing you here isn’t some horrible band that wrote a song “inspired by” the movie you are watching.  Besides the audio and visual departments, the lighting is also superb, as many of the nighttime shots aren’t hampered by the “I can’t see what is going on, but I probably should be able to” disease.  Lastly, the gore is very nice, striking a clean balance between practical effects accentuated by some noticeable, but unobtrusive cgi work that was probably required to get the 3-D affect to the blood and flying body parts.  I said it before and I will say it again, whoever had a hand in designing some of these kills and bringing them to life, deserves some credit, because the opening scenes alone are filled with some very disturbing and visceral kills.

Young Lady, put your GODDAMN seat belt on!

The 2009 remake of MBV supassed almost all of my expectations, which is saying a lot since I am a pretty die hard fan of the original.  Besides some inconsistencies and strange directing decisions, and a third act that doesn’t quite cash-in fully of the previous two, MBV 2009 is a rock solid slasher deeply rooted in the history of the artform.  It tries some new things, but just like a good student in an interesting class, it knows when to sit down, shut the fuck up, and play by the rules of the slasher movie bestowed upon them by giants of the sub-genre like Carpenter, Miner, Cunningham, and others.  In a year that will remembered for the Friday the 13th remake/re-imagining/sequel clusterfuck, don’t sleep on My Bloody Valentine 3-D.  It is likely the most fun and genuine throwback horror experience you are likely to have in ’09.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rcoc46onlE

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Now playing: Queens Of The Stone Age – Turnin’ On The Screw

via FoxyTunes

Vengeance from hell!

Someone bought this movie for me as a gift yesterday knowing my love for both Japanese movies and horror. While many of the characters are demons, I have to start with the disclaimer that this is not a horror movie per se, rather a film of a novelization of a historical political drama. The movie is based on both the actual Christian uprising of the Shimabara Revolt against the Shogunate in the 1600s and the novel Makai Tensho. To my knowledge this is the fifth movie to be made from this novel, and as the first came out in 1981 and starred Sonny Chiba I will be watching that one in the future.

As the movie begins, the leader of the revolt, Shiro Amukasa, is killed along with sixty something thousand of his followers and the Shogunate believes the rebellion has been quashed. What they didn’t count on is that Amukasa was learning an occult art called “Makai Tensho” or demonic transmigration while he was hanging around in hell. I guess this is similar to getting your law degree in prison?

Anyway, Amukasa returns to earth about ten years later as a demon in flesh and commences to raising demon allies using young womens’ bodies as vessels for the demons. The first and only time we watch the process, a very lovely and topless woman is strapped to a table with an upside down cross carved at the top of her sternum. For you pervs, the camera lingers on her breasts for a much longer time than is necessary for the story but this is the only pair in the movie. Soon her arm starts to bulge and then she explodes and a blood-soaked demon in the form of a man appears where she was. I liked the reversal of the Christian tradition in making the men from the womens’ bodies.

The story draws out slowly but evenly, revealing more about the nature of the demons, how they can be killed, even who is in the bodies because some people make surprise appearances after walking around in someone else’s body for awhile. There are a couple of nice twists and some action takes place off screen to be revealed later. What I enjoyed most is that the film knocks our usual perception of demons on its ass. You can’t tell who is a demon unless they appear to you in the form of someone whom you know to be dead, or if they make their eyes go all weird on purpose, or if they just come out and tell you, “hey, guess what, I’m a demon.” Nobody gets an exorcism and nobody gets eaten. They look like humans, but are able to fly through the air like 70s martial arts actors. There is even one character who gets possessed but holds the original character of a righteous person and even helps to fight the demons.

What about the swordfights? There are many of them and they get progressively more intricate as the main demon hunter Jubei Yagyu (the role originally played by Chiba) slashes his way up the demonic ladder. But there is a lot of doublecrossing and talking in between the fighting. The movie is not as gory as I would have liked; however,  it does boast one of the most badass death sequences I have ever seen as Yagyu takes a blade to the chest, fakes being more hurt than he is, and then pushes the blade the rest of the way through himself and through his unsuspecting opponent who is standing too closely behind him.

This was not the greatest movie ever but I had fun watching it, especially because I’d never heard of it and had no expectations going in. I couldn’t find much online about the movie and even IMDB has only two threads discussing it (with no arguing in either thread, wow) but someone at the Tokyo Shock company liked it a lot because the version I have is a two disc set with an entire disc of special features included. This version can be played with English dubbing or in Japanese with English subtitles. I recommend this for a rainy day when you feel like watching a story that has a little bit of everything.

[rating 3.5]

Even the print is blue

I didn’t know when I started my foray into horror writing three months ago that I would be going through my own lifetime wish list of movies to watch, but here I am again. I’m not the most technologically advanced of humans, so it took me until this year to get a copy of Cocksucker Blues. I heard about this movie ten years ago, when I was at the height of my Stones fandom, but of course couldn’t find a copy.

Now, I was excited when I watched Gimme Shelter the same year I first heard of Cocksucker Blues, so excited I watched it all by myself, at my trailer in the flatwoods 30 minutes from town then I called up my best friend, said, “you have to come out here right now and watch this movie.” So he did, and a religious experience was had.

That gives you some idea of what I have, as Ferris Bueller said about Cameron losing his virginity, built up in my mind as the be all end all of human existence. If I liked Gimme Shelter, surely I would love love love Cocksucker Blues. I mean, it is banned to this day, except for the filmmaker’s allowed yearly screening. This was supposed to be the sacred relic of sleaze! Especially the fabled groupie/roadie gangbang on an airplane, a flying airplane I believe, although no one on the plane as it turns out would have noticed if they had boarded them all on in New York, shut the door, opened it, told them they were in LA, and put them out. The twist to this scene was to be the Stones playing musical accompaniment. Well, there’s Mick with some kind of maraca deal and some guy playing a tambourine while a couple of two-pump chumps get it on with two girls for less than two minutes. Ta Daaah!

I know I do go on about being from the South, but believe me when I say that the only dialogue in the entire movie that I understood was a southern girl talking about how she always wanted to meet Keith because she had seen him on TV with an earring made out of a tooth. No one else in the film at any time said anything intelligible apart from a man called Marshall who gave a rambling explanation of the genesis of the title song. The soundtrack didn’t go with the action and the action was stream-of-consciousness. Don’t try and tell me that was for artistic purposes, not when I just saw a woman eat a heaping tablespoon of cocaine. I’m not kidding.

I saw the Rolling Stones on tour in 1989 and they sounded better than they did on this tour, which was for goddamn Exile on Main Street! Their supposed best album (I prefer Let It Bleed, but what can you do.) The only thing that shocked me about this film, other than how boring it was, was the large amount of footage of Mick and Keith actually hanging out together. Oh, and Mick Jagger needed a dollar bill to roll a joint. You would think he would have been a pro by then.

If Motley Crue had made this movie in 1992, they would have showed it at the multiplex with an NC-17 rating. That guy in the cancelled American show “Life on Mars” was pissed cause he got sent back to 1972 and 1972 was supposed to be so hopeless compared to our time. Well, send me back to 1972, honey, if this is the most shocking thing you got! I don’t know if the world got uglier since then, or if we just hear about it more, but things sure seem more hopeless now.

I give it 2 stars, and one of those is because raise your hand, we got to see some titties. And the other is because I like typing the word “cocksucker” with impunity.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars