I came home wiped out after a lousy day at work and wanted nothing more than to dissolve into bed with a little TV action to numb me. After checking the programming guide, there was nothing on! Figures. One last check and I stumbled upon “Frogs” being shown on Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey Network. Saved! El Rey has been showing some cool movies recently. Call them grindhouse features or exploitation or fantastic cinema films, whatever, you will find a wide range of cinema treats to keep you entertained. So, “Frogs” is a Seventies flick that touches on the theme of [More]
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad has to be stop motion animator, Ray Harryhausen’s, crowning achievement. Sinbad sets out on a fantastic odyssey to retrieve the ingredients to concoct a potion to release his love from a spell which has reduced her to the size of a doll. Many pitfalls and danger are met along the way, of course. The cyclops has become one of the icons of fantasy creatures unleashed on the masses, at least in my world. A sweeping, sprawling cinematic treat, this flick is packed with monsters, mystery, and action. Great creature models and the best stop motion animated work ever done by [More]
This clip is a masterfully staged study of the shark hunter Quint from Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws”. Quint, played by Robert Shaw, recounts his earlier in life run in with man eating sharks. The profound horror of this life threatening event probably played no small part in his decision to hunt sharks for a living. “Jaws” is still an amazing thrill ride of a movie after all these years. I think it may be Spielburg’s best picture. This scene is eminently creepy and evocative.
OK. Maybe the visual equivalent of paint drying at times but a genuinely creepy situation of some unknown creature baying in the woods. The second half, with the rocks being thrown, features some sort of grunting primate perhaps? I think I am glad that I didn’t get to see what was making all the racket. Sanity is a terrible thing to waste. Hehe.
My favorite episode from “Star Trek” – The Original Series. A marauding super weapon of ancient origins plummets through space destroying astral bodies in its wake to provide fuel for its continuing existence. The Enterprise, commanded by Captain James Kirk, attempts to put a stop to the machine’s path of destruction before any more lives are lost. Very well paced, exciting episode that provides plenty of action and suspense. Going back and watching “The Original Series” today, I am struck by the rather talkative, slow paced nature of a lot of the episodes. This segment provided a welcome alternative to [More]
“An American Werewolf in London” gets my vote for the best realized hybrid of the horror and comedy movie genres. But, to be sure, the emphasis is clearly on the horror of the entire situation. Two young Americans are on a backpacking trek across the lonely expanses of Britain when they encounter the completely unexpected. Both are savagely attacked by a giant wolf creature. One is killed but the other unlucky soul lives to experience the nightmare of werewolf transformation. Humor in the style of “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers” but what would you expect from the director of all three [More]
A sad excuse of a cash in, Halloween 5 is full of screeching teenager and kid victims. Scares, interest and originality are lacking. Michael Myers, the unstoppable bogeyman of the Halloween franchise, lumbers in the shadows and then emerges to massacre the human fodder who pass for characters in this dreck. Repetitive, noisy, cliched, wretched. The “creative” team behind this mess were willing to pass off this trash for a quick buck. Since Michael will never die, expect this shambles of a series to continue on indefinitely.
Assemblage of concert footage features Pink Floyd in concert playing “Sheep”. This song appeared on their release “Animals”. The Pink Floyd concert experience was a mixed media event with film clips and visuals projected onto a massive screen, lasers, a light show, and huge props reflecting song subject matter. Here we witness a very saturated color film of the performance and hear the rich aural textures of synthesizer (Richard Wright), processed guitar (David Gilmour), reverberating vocals (Roger Waters) and driving drumbeats (Nick Mason) intermixed. Trippy to say the least. Nice use of vocoder near the end of this clip.
Very twisted clip from John Carpenter’s The Thing. A chest that opens up and sports big, jagged fangs? The better to bite your hands off with! Ugly. Outstanding mechanical visual effects by Rob Bottin. All these monster effects had to be built from wire frames and then dressed to achieve the required look and then remotely made to function by one or more operators A lot of motors, wires, cables and what have you brought these monsters to life. Disney called them animatronics. They don’t make them like this anymore. CG is much quicker and cheaper.
Surprise shocks as people in scary costumes jump out from behind doors, curtains, out of ice cream freezers, etc. Bring an extra diaper along for this one.
I was looking at the Phantasm (1979) trailer and I noticed actor Angus Scrimm, who played ungodly ghoul “The Tall Man” in this series, and “rocker” Gene Simmons of KISS band fame seem to share a few common traits. Check out Phantasm, the movie, and see if you can name a few similarities. Just thought of another one! Both are curators of an interdimensional collective of freaks! Heres the Phantasm trailer link: http://youtu.be/nJojkFFUsdo
Probably my all time favorite movie. This trailer is interesting in that it has the crude egg model and the tracking shot of the alien planet surface which are unique to the trailer and do not appear in the theatrical release. Hugely influential film.
Tensions between America and the Eastern Bloc escalate into a devastating nuclear exchange. We see the bleak results unleashed on one of our large cities and its populace. There is an extended sequence in this made for television movie, “The Day After”, detailing a very harrowing nuclear missile attack on Kansas City, USA. It is an interesting collage of actual documentary footage detailing the effects on structures and the landscape by the detonation of atomic weapons, sound effects, and newly created film effects of buildings and bodies vaporizing in the flash heat fires which accompany nuclear blasts. Awful.
This picture was made on a small budget and sports some Ray Harryhausen style stop motion animation effects. Pretty good effects at that. Sometimes the figures and models look out of scale with their background but the motion achieved is more than adequate. This is a good flick for a lazy Saturday afternoon: enough thrills to keep you occupied but nothing spectacular either. Kid finds blaster in the desert which allows him to blow things to smithereens. Cool! The unfortunate side effect of the weapon is that it turns the kid into a hideous green- hued monster. The alien owners [More]