Best of the Best is a surprisingly emotional US Martial Arts flick that can't seem to make up its mind if it's a brainless, kid-friendly actioner or an inspirational sports drama, resulting in one of the goofiest, most melodramatic pieces of junk I've watched in months. And it's glorious.
I appreciate they made an effort here. I mean they've cast real actors like James Earl Jones and Louise frickin' Fletcher for Chrissake! Even Eric Roberts has some chops (Kinda), yet…
Like if Ferris Bueller's Day Off somehow crashed into Scorsese's After Hours. To many, this would seem like a bad idea, but to me, it's solid gold. The plot is contrived perhaps, but the film runs like a dream and it has style in spades. That Tangerine Dream soundtrack is just the icing on the cake.
Essential Teen Movie shenanigans.
Fun, ultra-violent and gore-heavy.... yet it was "just ok"?
My main issue with Evil Dead Rise is that it spends so much time trying to evoke other horror classics that it barely remembers to be an Evil Dead movie.
Lee Cronin's reverence for the genre is evident but I'm not here to watch Evil Dead crossed with The Lost Boys, or The Shining, or Aliens, or Demons 2 (have I missed any others?), I'm here to watch The Evil Dead…
Didn't know much about this going in, but it absolutely blew me away. Packs more intensity and gore into its lean 20-minute run time than most films do in 120 minutes. And then I saw David Fincher's name pop up as Director at the end.
Essential.
Utterly hilarious 'Oooooligan film made by the BBC where the only thing thicker than its characters is the weapons-grade melodrama surrounding them.
This is a standard "Undercover Copper" movie, distinguished only for kind of kick-starting the modern Football Hooligan/Cockney Gangster/English Dick-Head STV genre that's still going strong today, thanks to tripe like Green Street.
If the idea of men with over-exaggerated cockney accents beating lumps out each other is your idea of entertainment (and it certainly was for 12-year-old me)…
What a mess.
What a great big beautiful brilliant mess.
I can relate to Teri Garr's storyline because I too would like to dance with Raúl Juliá. I can also relate to Frederik Forrest, because who wouldn't fall for Nastassja Kinski walking a tightrope in the desert?
The problem is that one of these threads is believable while the other (that Kinski would be interested in a schlub like Forrest) is frankly unbelievable.... I mean, I know this is supposed…
Ricochet... or as I like to call it; John Lithogow's Sexual Awakening.
I don't know what I was expecting with Ricochet, but what I got sure wasn't it. I figured it'd be a standard Cat&Mouse thriller with some funny Lithogow barbs.... what I didn't expect was it to be a fully-charged homoerotic trash masterpiece!
After bungling the heist of his life, John Lithgow is captured by the sight of Denzel Washington in his briefs, and nothing will ever be the…
Just when I thought Italian Cinema couldn't get any dumber, along comes Night Killer to decimate what little brain cells I had left.
From its nonsensical dance-troupe opening to its WTF finale, this thing delivers nothing but hilarity from first frame til last. Come for the Kruger-inspired villain, but stay for the multiple chest punches, the sweaty "heroic" rapist and some of the craziest dialog exchanges in cinematic history (which is saying a lot when you consider Claudio Fragasso wrote…
Wow, I didn't think you could be any more "late-stage Italian" than Luigi Cozzi's "The Black Cat" but here we are.
I know Bava's Beyond The Door 2 isn't exactly a proper sequel, but at least you can see a connection if you squint really hard... but this? WTF even is this?
The plot is baffling to say the least. A bunch of dorky American students (who all look older than their teacher, I might add!) head to Eastern Europe…
"Let's just say, I hunt bad guys..."
Within approximately 35 seconds of this movie starting, we've been given enough exposition to fill three different movies and then a Jeep crashes through a window, likely killing all stuntmen involved.
Yep, I'm watching another Arizal joint!
And if you think the film slows down after that catapulting Jeep disaster, think again, because ARIZAL JOINTS DON'T SLEEP!
We get more car chases, car crashes, face punches, roundhouse kicks, furniture smashing, basement battling, electro-torturing,…
RIP Ruggero Deodato.
I remember this was the first film I ever saw that my parents actively tried to hide from me. No word of a lie, I borrowed a nasty-looking VHS bootleg from the Camden Film Fair days off a friend when I was 12 years old and my Dad watched it with my brother the night before I was planning to.
The next morning I woke up, excitedly as I usually did back then, to watch that nasty…
Occhiali Neri feels like Argento entering his late-period-Fulci phase; banging out the greatest hits on cheap cameras, while a cast of mostly terrible actors get sliced and diced with more style than the budget can handle, with tacky keyboards screaming in the background.
And I'm perfectly OK with that.
At its heart, this is a decent low-budget Giallo, but with Argento behind the lens, it takes more than a few detours into outright phantasmagoria and horror. It's kind of all…