Monthly Archives: October 2021

Bloodbath At The House Of Death (1984) is comedy horror, done in the best possible taste

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Now calm yourselves, for I must give you a warning. This film is silly. Very, very silly. It’s very obviously being daft by making a mockery of a lot of what would have been popular movies at the start of the 80s, especially the so-called “video nasties”. Thankfully the cliches and styles that it rips into are still with us after 40 years, so you should be able to get the majority of the jokes. Especially those about boobs and willies, you filthy degenerates!
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Class of 1999 II: The Substitute (1994)

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We finally reach the third and final part of the “Class of…” series of movies, with the Class of 2001. Well, the release title is ‘Class of 1999 II: The Substitute’, but that’s awful and the producers were cowards, so I’m just ignoring that. They also forgot to get Mark Lester involved, other than presumably the cashing of a nice cheque, but it’s still got enough markers of the original two to make this into a semi-coherent trilogy. Continue reading →

The VelociPastor (2019)

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Yes, I know this was the talk of the psychotronic town a couple of years ago. I was too busy watching other junk to get around to it, and I’ve got a weird (possibly anti-hipster) aversion to popular B-Movies, so that’s another cheap newscycle I missed out on. Anyway, I’m here and I’m sorry I missed the start of the party because, holy heck, this is one fun movie. Continue reading →

Dune (2021)

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Cards on the table, I’m a lifetime fan of the book Dune. Probably not the most committed of fans out there, but since I first found out the 1984 movie had a book to go with it I’ve read it roughly once every year. So it’s safe to say that I was really excited when I heard there was going to be another forlorn attempt at making The Film of The Book, and then when I found out if was Denis Villeneuve I was very excited to heard he’d be the person doing it wrong. Five years, $156 million dollars, and 156 minutes later and I’m happy to say that it isn’t the film or the book, and that’s great.
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Class of 1999 (1992)

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Previously on Trash or Treasure, we watched Mark L Lester’s ode-to-armed-vigilante-killings: Class of 1984. Well, 8 years later he had another school-violence based story up his sleeve so envisioned, produced, and directed a cyberpunk follow-up, so it would be unfair not to see how things had changed in his mind.
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Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021), but not about the music

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As someone who claims to like discovering new cinematic experiences, it does good to watch a film that really isn’t aimed at you from time to time. So, I ended up watching a musical that was causing a lot of fuss and wasn’t the one I’m trying to raise money for Crisis with. The end result was mostly enjoyable, but it was very far nearer a call than I expected.
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Class of 1984 (1982) is amazingly vulgar propaganda

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The modern Vigilante movie, kicked off by Dirty Harry and perfected by Death Wish, has always carried with them a right-wing political subtext about the nature of society and the need for the individual to step in when the system fails. Well Mark L Lester, writer, director, and producer of this particular American conservative propaganda piece, thinks subtext is a communist conspiracy. He also thinks coherent settings are cowardice and subtlety is for pinko liberals, and this film is all the better for it.
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Killer Sofa (2019)

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If the title hasn’t given it away already, this 2019 film written and directed by Bernie Rao is ridiculous. It’s called “Killer Sofa”, it’s about a piece of home furnishing that kills people, and the main character is literally a recliner chair that the director picked up for one hundred New Zealand dollars. So, if you either aren’t already pumped up for this level of silliness or are going “but a recliner chair isn’t a sofa!” then this film is absolutely not for you. No one will judge you for that and it’s better that you leave now before you look confused as to why everyone enjoying it is giggling over a police officer having the last name of “Gravy”.
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The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1968)

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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has, over the 134 years since it was first published, earned its place as a work of horror fiction so ubiquitous within pop culture that most people know the basic story without having needed to read the book. However, unlike it’s more camera-friendly equals of Frankenstein or Dracula, it’s also one that an audience is unlikely to have seen on the big screen in anything like its original form. Modern world retellings, comedy twists (normally involving the perceived hilarity of a gender switch), and outright plot bastardization abound, to varying degrees of success (and If you must watch The Nutty Professor then for god’s sake make it the 1963 Jerry Lewis one!) Continue reading →

Backtrack (2015)

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Who’s up for a bit of 2015 “mystery thriller” starring Oscar-winning Adrian Brody and every-award-but-an-Oscar winning Sam Neill? Sure that’s going to get you excited? What if we said it was written, directed, and produced by Michael Petroni, director of well-received The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Rite, and The Book Thief (and actor in DAAS Kapital, for the obscure 90s-TV-lovers out there)? Probably not as much, but you’d think you would be in safe hands. That you hadn’t heard of the film might make you a bit hesitant, but surely it can’t be that bad with such a pedigree?
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