I never got around to seeing this the first time it was released in the UK, mostly because I found the cover showing Antonio Resines’s bloody face rather too menacing for me to dare pick it up from the shelf in Blockbuster. Now it’s out in glorious HD, thanks to Arrow, and I got sent a screener of it so there was no backing out of watching it.
The subtext is explosions
The tagline for this is “The antisocial son of an alcoholic father and a bipolar mother grows up in 1960s Ireland”, so forgive me if that and the colour grade on the promo photos meant I went in thinking this would be some overly earnest misery-porn. What we have here is some high-quality bait-and-switch weirdness that simply has to be explored. And, yes, a bit of 60s Ireland misery-porn. Continue reading
For those who don’t know it, ALF was a mid-80s sitcom about and Alien Life Form living with a suburban middle-class family in a generically affluent part of mid-80s California. Other than ALF’s propensity for eating cats, it was mild mannered family entertainment hinging on culture shock and mild ill-mannered behaviour. As a series it touched on nothing of any real importance, other than being based on a flagrant disregard for immigration laws, and it go through it’s 102 episodes on the principle that anyone will laugh at a 3-foot-tall fury humanoid with a Connecticut accent. So whilst I knew the series ended on ALF being captured by the US Air Force I wasn’t expecting the movie to be an unrelenting nightmare.
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This was watched because it looked like a cheesy mix between a vampire movie & Cocoon and because John Saxon always adds a touch of class to a movie. The trailer was that kind of uninspiring middle-of-the-road schleppy that can sometimes be the snuggly sci-fi horror blanket you need.
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There is a lot in common between my blog and the filmography of Richard Stanley. They’re both essentially uncommercial works, they are based on a love of cinema and belief in the scope of what movies can be, and they both rely on introspection interspersed with brutal violence. But whilst I do quick reads about other people’s work for free, he convinces people to give him millions of dollars to make two-hour gothic epics set in random deserts. Also; he once got driven crazy by Val Kilmer, but that’s a whole other story.
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Want a practical example of why bad films get released under multiple names? This bit of viewing was picked purely on the grounds of there being the word “cyber” in its title; so had it been seen under its “Phoenix 2” or “Droid Gunner” monikers then you wouldn’t be about to read this cautionary tale. Then again, had just that bit more effort been put in by director Fred Olen Ray then the following would probably have been far more positive. It’s funny how life works out like that.
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If you’re worried about this 1999 Louis Morneau directed movie being a low-budget creepy-crawly-horror cash-in for Lou Diamond Phillips, then don’t panic. This is actually a disaster movie, starring Dina Meyer with Lou Diamond Phillips as the bit of totty that the hero wins at the end. It just looks like it’s an attempt to milk the last scrap of Arachnophobia money still on the table because that’s the only way it could sell its radical feminist agenda.
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Ruffians are running the town in Arse End Of Nowhere, and the sheriff can’t stop them. A mysterious Stranger with a mysterious past rolls into town, all mysteriously, and starts dishing out some brutal street justice. We’ve seen the movie a hundred times, but is it enough that in this 1995 Fritz Kiersch The Stranger is a woman?
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It’s time for an exciting three-way combo of amazing opportunity: a horror anthology with a bit of a cyberpunk taste to it! It’s also got a spectacular cast of “oooh, it’s them! From that film!” actors, and, in a random act of trivia, the music was done by J.J. Abrams. This can’t possibly go wrong, as nothing JJ Abrams has been involved in has ever been a shonky rip-off of better things that totally misses what made them good in the first place.
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As a long-time reader of The Fortean Times, and having a general interest in the more esoteric bits of social history, I was keen to find out what this dramatization of the Cottingley Fairies story would be like. I could remember it making some noise when it first came out, but that was mostly because it was a British costume drama that had some bits of CGI in it rather than because it was a great film. So I was also curious if was going to be bogged down with The Great British Worthiness that meant we had tried to pretend we never had a genre cinema industry after the 70s. Continue reading
Trash or Treasure 