The Quiet Earth

This strange little sci-fi film from New Zealand circa 1985 is an interesting one. It follows a scientist who wakes up one morning to discover that the population of the planet has disappeared, in all probability, as a result of an upper-atmosphere military experiment that he was a part of. As he deals with first […]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I hadn’t seen this one in about 20 or so years and I hit ‘Play’ with a certain amount of apprehension, fully expecting age and nostalgia to be unkind. You know what?…it held up pretty damn well actually. What was fun was to now pick up on certain jokes that flew right over my immature […]

Sleeping Beauty

This strange little Australian tale from 2011 features Emily Browning (Sucker Punch) as Lucy, a morally flexible waitress/student who ends up moonlighting as a very unique escort. Willingly drugged, she sleeps through the physical whims of a series of rich old men, all varied in their issues and depravities. This film is full of almost […]

Johnny Got His Gun

This 1971 anti-war ‘classic’ is a surreal nightmare of a flick centered on the disconnected mental ramblings and delusional recollections of a young, naive country boy, reduced to something resembling a Chicken McNugget by a German artillery shell on the last day of WW1. This strange, hodge-podge of image and sound (some quite good) carries […]

The Last Battle

This quirky, B/W post-apocalypse flick from 1983 is director Luc Besson’s (The Fifth Element) first film…and it’s a weird one. It focus’ on the bizarre, mute denizens of a deserted city and their strange ‘comings and goings’. The beautifully composed B/W cinematography certainly adds to the art-house mood while the jazz lounge/80’s porn music score […]

The Killing Room

Very well executed psychological thriller from 2009 about a group of ‘volunteers’ subjected to a sinister mind control experiment. The cast is a ‘who’s who’ of familiar faces and they’re all good. One thing that REALLY stood out was the creepy and minimalist atmosphere and sound design. I haven’t heard radio chatter that effective in […]

Sanctum

For a pretty sweet looking film, this movie sure does suck. The ‘acting’ is wooden all around and the vast majority of the dialogue is awful and cringe-inducing. The center-piece of the film is a horribly cliche’d story of an estranged father and son who must overcome their differences and fight to survive when a […]

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

This MAY be the best in the series (I’m partial to #3 too). This one is really well done in nearly every way. The stunt work is amazing, the gadgets are cool and appropriately far-fetched, it’s quite well edited and the scatterings of humor are nicely placed.The writers came up with some slick and fairly […]

Tomorrow When the War Began

If a remake of ‘Red Dawn’ HAS to be made, this 2010 Aussie action flick is definitely on the right track. Where the American movie of ’84 was the definition of Cold War pessimism and paranoia, this slick ‘retelling’ smells like popcorn, in the best way. The characters, played by a dedicated group of Australian […]

Blow Out

This interesting but simple murder mystery from 1981 stars John Travolta as a movie sound tech who inadvertently records the perceived accidental death of a politician in a car wreck. Using his sound/film knowledge, he pieces together a conspiracy involving a slew of ‘low-lives’, including a cartoonishly creepy John Lithgow. Travolta is decent as the […]