The Company of Wolves

This retelling/hybrid Little Red Riding Hood-werewolf movie from 1984 is a good example of ‘style over substance’. The story is too fragmented for its own good and has some high-school level acting tossed in the mix. On the plus side, it boasts a very detailed Gothic style and atmosphere that Tim Burton would be right […]

Special Forces

This French/English/Arabic language military thriller from 2011, despite being saddled with a horribly generic, ‘Direct-To-DVD’-sounding title, is actually really well done. The fact the the filmmakers had the full cooperation of the French military goes a long way as the equipment, the tactics and the vehicles all feel legit with no CG enhancements. Stylistically, the […]

The Monster Squad

So after 1990’s TMNT, I felt brave enough to try another childhood fave, this time from ’87. And…2 for 2!!! This flick is still a hoot! It’s surprisingly well done with some cool ‘slants’ style-wise on the classic Universal monster styles and a noticeable mean streak, which I appreciated. Another reason that I dug this, […]

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 […]