Review – Tooth and Nail

The only points I’m going to dish out to this one are for originality of premise. Here the apocalypse that destroys society as we know it is simply running out of gas. But once that’s established in the first ten minutes or so, the rest of the picture is an exceptionally dull struggle between the “foragers” – decent people like most of us imagine we are, just struggling to survive – and the “rovers” – cannibal gang members trying to make a meal of the good guys. This was the only movie from the Horrorfest 2007 set that I hadn’t seen, which is pretty much the only reason why I bothered with it to begin with. See if desperate

Review – Death Race 2000

In the far-off, distant future of the year 2000 our country will be run by a dictator named Mister President, and the most popular sport in the land will be a coast-to-coast road rally in which the drivers get points for running over people. This is a silly little action comedy starring David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone back in the days before they were big enough to turn down roles like these. Mildly amusing

Review – The House on Skull Mountain

I was a little surprised by this movie. The description made it sound like a run-of-the-mill “it’s de voodoo, I tells ya” exploitation picture, and at least to an extent it was. But it also featured black actors playing non-stereotypical roles and delivering lines in standard English. Indeed, the one character who fits in with Hollywood’s notion of black people in 1974 sticks out like a sore thumb. Plus it’s set in Atlanta, which also helped challenge a few voodoo clichés. Beyond that, unfortunately, this isn’t a particularly good movie. It falls especially flat in the last half hour, when we’re treated to the Most Boring Voodoo Ceremony Ever immediately followed by the Most Poorly Choreographed Machete Fight Ever. Mildly amusing

Review – Room 6

The set-up here is pure Twilight Zone: our heroine and her boyfriend are in a car accident, but when she tries to join him at the hospital she learns that the ambulance never arrived. After days of searching, she discovers that he’s been taken to a ghost hospital, sort of an evil Brigadoon filled with damned souls that feed on the blood of the patients. This might have made a perfectly good half hour TV show, but in order to stretch it to a feature-length movie it has to be packed with a lot of filler and slow spots. Mildly amusing

Review – The Terror of Tiny Town

I don’t have enough experience with oaters to be able to tell if this would have been a good example of the sub-genre if it hadn’t been a “special” movie. But the question isn’t important, because the production’s “special-ness” squashes any chance that it might otherwise have been good. The “all-midget” cast is subjected to no end of “hilarious” gags and situations designed to take advantage of their size. Thus the production remains consistently dull, stupid and offensive throughout. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Coneheads

Lorne Michaels takes a cute little skit from a couple of Saturday Night Live episodes back in the 70s and turns it into yet another SNL stinker movie in the early 90s. Aliens with oddly-shaped craniums awkwardly try to adjust to life in the suburbs. That supplied enough material for a ten-minute sketch or two, but it doesn’t even come close to driving a whole 90-minute movie. But the real crying shame here is the wanton squandering of a great cast. Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin redo the lead roles, and they’re backed up by a smorgasbord of SNL greats (too many really good actors to even try to list here). They even pick up support from folks who never worked directly for Michaels before. But wow are they ever not put to good use. See if desperate

Review – Bush's Brain

Everything you never cared to know about Karl Rove. Here we’ve got a key player in a regime responsible for thousands upon thousands of unnecessary deaths and a shameful and in some ways unprecedented erosion of American society. Yet Rove’s critics – or at least the ones recorded here – seem a lot more worried about the little creep’s affinity for dishonest campaign tactics. Further, it’s the usual liberal line: hand-wringing and sob stories. The problem with devoting a huge chunk of screen time to the sad tale of a Marine killed in one of Bush’s cooked-up conflicts is that it’s an argument against war in general, not the latest conflicts in particular. If this is the best case that can be made against scum like Rove, then someone isn’t trying hard enough. See if desperate

Review – The Dark

This gets off to a slow start, and even after it gets underway it doesn’t really amount to much. Indeed, once ghosts and living people start swapping places back and forth between our earthly plane and some kind of half-baked Welsh afterlife, a heavy flavor of Ring rip-off overlies the whole mess. Oh, and if you’re a fan of sheep then you’re certainly going to want to give this one a miss. See if desperate

Review – Little Big Man

My favorite parts of this movie are anything that doesn’t directly involve Dustin Hoffman. With less fawning attention on the star, this could have been a reasonably entertaining if somewhat slowly-paced 60s western. They had the cast playing some quirky characters. They had some good situations, ranging from medicine shows to tribal warfare to the Little Big Horn. They even had Arthur Penn, who has done much better work elsewhere. Perhaps some movie buff with time to spare could cut this down a bit and turn it into a decent picture. Mildly amusing

Review – Crazy Eights

Eight former childhood friends gather at an orphanage, where they oh-so-slowly unearth traumatic memories. Every once in awhile the picture hits on an interesting visual or a spooky situation, but then it goes right back to being dull again. See if desperate

Review – Borderland

If they’d just made an unembroidered version of the actual events upon which this is ostensibly based, it could have been a much better movie. Instead what we get is yet another slash-intensive warning to young white people to stay away from Mexico because all – or at least most – of the “foreigners” who live there are out to sacrifice tourists to their Santeria gods in order to protect their drug smuggling operations. The final nails in the coffin are the long passages where nothing happens. If you’re going to make a slasher movie, at least don’t make a dull one. See if desperate

Review – Lake Dead

The location where this was shot looks a great deal like the motel used in the genre classic Motel Hell. But that and a mid-range body count is all the two pictures have in common. The label description calls the members of the victim parade “teenagers,” though they look about as school-age as the cast of Grease. In any event, two or three of them inherit a motel in the middle of nowhere. The sheer worthlessness of the property itself isn’t helped by the presence of a clan of backwoods serial killers. See if desperate

Review – Boogeyman 2

Oddly enough, this one’s a little better than the first one. The original rolled the dice and came up empty. This one sticks a lot closer to standard slasher movie structures and conventions. The result is mediocre, but at least it isn’t totally annoying. The story is an unimaginative reheat of Nightmare on Elm Street 3, with most if not all the plot twists telegraphed a mile away as the Boogeyman slaughters mental patients using methods tailored to their phobias. Mildly amusing

Review – Unearthed

From a movie that promised a monster dug up by an archaeologist, I was hoping for something more, well, archaeological. I guess there was a brief, disposable mention of the Anasasi around midway through, but the vast majority of this is a desert southwest Alien rip with an “ensemble” cast of uninteresting candidates for monster chow. See if desperate

Review – The Deaths of Ian Stone

So how many critics before me have called this a nightmare version of Groundhog Day? Our buddy Ian keeps getting killed over and over by the same eerie conspiracy of monsters. There’s a point to it somewhere, but it’s slow to emerge and flimsy when it finally does show up. Overall this seems to be little more than a cheap excuse to string a lot of monster killin’ vignettes together into what loosely amounts to a movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Seven Days to Noon

Though nuclear terrorism isn’t exactly a novel concept in the 21st century, it’s tantalizingly ahead of its time in this British production from 1950. A scientist working on England’s A-bomb program becomes disgusted with the immorality of the endeavor. He steals a briefcase nuke (another bit of radical thinking at the time) and threatens to blow up London in a week if the government won’t agree to disarm. But it isn’t just the concept that’s novel. We also lack a clear-cut bad guy. The mad scientist is sympathetic in a way – his heart clearly in the right place even if his head isn’t – and his pursuers are English genteel rather than Jack Bauer rabid. Even the small touches are great, particularly the eerie searches through an evacuated London. Overall this is way better than many subsequent, more sophisticated productions. Buy the disc (assuming it's available on disc; I watched this on TCM)

Review – Dances with Wolves

As if trying to single-handedly make up for decades of anti-Indian racism in westerns, Kevin Costner serves up a version in which the Sioux are the do-no-wrong heroes and the cavalry are the unequivocal forces of evil. That might be somewhat closer to the truth, but it’s not much more entertaining than the traditional version. Indeed, such a simple-minded, heavy-handed presentation makes the pro-environment, anti-discrimination message ring false. Oh, and the damn thing drags on for nearly four hours’ worth of bad acting and animal death. What a pain in the butt. See if desperate

Review – Dark Breed

Y’know, film-makers who have special effects this crappy probably shouldn’t make the whole movie depend on them. And though I deleted this from the Tivo before I checked the date, I assume it was from sometime after Predator came out, as the monsters – when they do eventually show themselves – are a pretty tragic rip-off. Aliens possess astronauts who then return to earth and do a lot of really boring stuff. See if desperate

Review – The Devil Came on Horseback

When ex-Marine Brian Steidle took a job chronicling human rights abuses in Darfur, apparently he wasn’t prepared for what he’d find. This documentary takes us along as he photographs the corpses and wreckage left in the wake of atrocities committed by the Janjaweed (“Devils on Horseback”), Sudan’s death squads. It pretty much goes without saying that this is a depressing experience, but it’s also a good way to stop ignoring the problem and at least learn a bit about what’s going on. Mildly amusing

Review – Revelation

This picture marks a milestone in my movie-watching experience: it’s the first one I ever watched via the Internet (using Netflix’s newly-Mac-compatible “instant” option). I wasn’t at all disappointed by the technology (it’s not as good as a DVD, but for a lot of movies that’s no big deal). However, I am slightly sorry I didn’t mark the occasion with a better choice of picture. This is a mediocre bit of skullduggery clearly intended to cash in on the whole Da Vinci Code thing. Since ancient times the forces of darkness have been trying to locate a box containing blah blah blah so it’s fortunate that it’s protected by oh honestly nobody gives a damn. See if desperate

Review – Rough Magik

It’s actually a little hard to determine exactly what the title of this production is. The label on the DVD identifies it as “Dreams of Cthulhu Vol. 2: The Rough Magik Initiative.” Here I’m opting to go with what the show is called by its own title card, if for no other reason than it’s shorter. The production leads off with a disturbing bit of video of a mother and her kids getting a little too into the Cthulhu cult thing. From there it breaks with not much of a segue into the tale of a mythos-sensitive officer in the British Army encountering some evil business during the Falklands War. It’s a clever concept that unfortunately turns into a mediocre production. On the other hand, the disk also includes four shorts. “The Terrible Old Man” is a solid – and considerably less racist – version of the Lovecraft story. Likewise “From Beyond” sticks pretty close to the source story, a plus for those of us who like Lovecraft’s work but probably a minus for anyone who prefers the sex-intensive Stuart Gordon version. “Experiment 17” and “Experiment 18” are mockumentaries about Nazi tampering with the Necronomicon, not too inspirational but then not too long either. Worth seeing

Review – Mark of the Devil (1984)

Poor Dirk Bennedict. Right on the verge of his marriage to filthy rich and smokin’ hot Jenny Seagrove, his bad gambling debts catch up to him. In order to pay off the mob, he decides to steal from a tattoo artist who’s half Chinese and half Haitian. How much more voodoo can you mess with all at once? From a single stab from his victim’s needle, a macabre tattoo starts to grow. And grow and grow until it starts taking over his whole body. The concept is clever enough in a tattoo horror cliché sort of way, but the execution leaves something to be desired. Mildly amusing

Review – Carrie (2002)

Once again a Stephen King movie is subjected to an unnecessary remake. And once again it’s both longer and more watered-down than the original. If this had been the first film version of King’s first novel, it would have been okay, not actively offensive but likewise nothing to write home about. But since there’s already a good version out there, this just lacks a raison d’etre. Unless, of course, the new surprise ending is worth the three hours that precede it. Personally, I liked the old ending better. Mildly amusing

Review – Centipede!

Though this doesn’t have any direct connection to the video game of the same name (minus the exclamation point), I honestly would rather have spent an hour and a half blasting mushrooms and ducking spiders than sitting through stale tripe like this. A group of obnoxious American twentysomethings gets lost in a cave in India. It’s their double bad luck that the place is full of giant poisonous bugs and the local officials who are trying to rescue them are the Indian equivalent of the Keystone Kops. The only thing I find intriguing about productions like this is that they manage to be simultaneously implausible and predictable. See if desperate

Review – Cyclops

So what combination of words best augurs quality of this degree: “Sci Fi Channel presents” or “Eric Roberts”? And the two combined, well, there’s just no avoiding the creation of a picture like this. Apparently the Emperor Tiberius presided over a Rome about the size of Lawrence, Kansas (except of course Lawrence has a bigger stadium; the Colosseum in this thing is about the size of a high school gym). And after he’s killed by a CGI Cyclops (that might be a spoiler in a movie that isn’t so totally spoiled to begin with) Rome becomes a republic once again. Wow. See if desperate