We all know that, just as in real life, children are evil little homunculi, hellbent on destruction (at least I sure as heck remember being one). However, the Mikey in this movie is one step above by being a stone-cold killer; murdering well above his age with a variety of weapons and facial twitches. All because he just needs to feel loved but can’t be because he’s an absolutely awful little shit.
I’m going to keep this review short and to the point, mostly as the director/writer Jon Jacobs didn’t with the film. It was based on a late 50s Fritz Langer short story, and somewhere in it is the basis of a pretty decent entry into the mid-90s supernatural goth-horror canon. Unfortunately, that gets crowded out due to either a lack of narrative focus or a need to hit the promised run time.
Italian cinema has brought us many marvels in its time, including a range of Mad Max, The Warriors, and Escape From New York rip-offs. The wonderfully titled “1990: The Bronx Warriors”, directed by Enzo G. Castellari, written by committee, and produced by frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator Fabrizio De Angelis, took the bold decision to try and do all three at once. The resulting film with the Italian flair that Hollywood stole for its Westerns and the cost-cutting technique of having the multinational cast all speak in their native tongues, is predictably low-budget craziness. But for all its flaws, of which there are many, it has a vibrant charm and bucket-load of ideas that will get you through to its straight-up ridiculous ending.
It’s safe to say that Mike Mendez is not a household name when it comes to directors. Despite having had two films included in the Sundance Festival, 2000’s The Convent and this review’s 1996 Killers, he has significantly more credits as an editor for TV and documentaries. The only two films you are likely to have heard of by him are 2013’s Big Ass Spider!, because of that name, and 2016’s The Last Heist, because Henry Rollins is the bad guy in it. Killers, his first movie as director and writer, probably demonstrates both why he isn’t that well known and also why people keep on letting him make films.
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This film is driven by the utterly devastating double act of Willem Dafoe as “X” and Christopher Walken as “Fox”, in what are their only co-starring roles on-screen (because otherwise, the world would collapse from the combined weight of their awesomeness). Both are involved in the seedy world of corporate espionage; Walken the work-orientated master and Dafoe the experienced but more money-focused journeyman. They have managed to get a job extracting Hiroshi, a highly valuable R&D scientist (played, mostly through video surveillance and sci-fi filters, by Yoshitaka Amano) from his current job to a new place of employment. To do this they have recruited Sandi (Asia Argento) to seduce him.
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Sometimes you really can judge a movie by its cover, and I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle is everything that you can expect from such a high-concept title. It’s a campy horror-comedy about someone buying a motorcycle, finding out that it’s a vampire, and then dealing with the fallout from that. It’s got blood, it’s got gore, it’s got actors that any British audience of the time would have recognised as “oooh, it’s them off of the telly!” and it’s got Anthony Daniels to make the rest of the world go “oooh, it’s them off of Star Wars!”. If you want something serious, either in concept or delivery, then you only have yourself to blame for your disappointment, and if you want to spend 101 minutes really ugly-laughing at a film then read on.
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Lord of Illusions has, once you look into it, a hell of a production history. Witten, directed, and partly produced by horror grandmaster Clive Barker, it should have been a shoo-in for a classic reputation as part of the mid-90s Premillennial apocalyptic gothic-horrors. However, instead of riding the wave of Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Candyman, it got bogged down in budgetary constraints and bitter disputes over final-cut issues. Then again, it also had a nifty set of promotional images and thus caught my eye when dredging through the lower portions of Netflix.
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Rock and Roll and horror movies have always been connected at the swaggering hip. From the ’50s onward they have shared an undying bond of heightened emotions, juvenile daydreaming, cheap production values, the mystique of delinquency, and high tempo drama. So, getting Guitar Wolf, arguably the finest garage rock bands to have come out of the 80’s Tokyo punk scene, and putting them in a zombie movie is a bit of a no-brainer. That the movie is this fast, chaotic, and unwilling to slow down for anyone just makes it even more perfect. That Takeuchi Tetsuro, a prominent music video director, directed this 1999 psychotronic rock-&-roll fable is just the cherry on top of the Molo
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It seems such a simple concept; meld cold war tensions with a bit of post-apocalyptic dystopia and a whole load of massive robot combat. It has everything a 1990 audience could want: sinister and cynical futurism, the chance for a bit of “USA! USA!” optimism, and the timeless wonder of hundred-foot steel homunculi beating the tar out of each other. Yet somehow what should have been Stuart Gordon’s directorial mainstream breakthrough, after writing Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, became a by-line in his filmography. But was it as bad as the critics made out? Well, two out of three decent acts ain’t bad!!
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Life is perfect for Megan (Natasha Lyonne), All-American Cheerleader and girlfriend to the football champ, in mid-west, middle-class, middle-school. The only problem is that she’s gay as a maypole, even if she doesn’t know it. Good news! Her parents are sending her off to True Directions for a bit of corrective therapy. It’s a two-month program of five steps to Straightdom, led by Cathy Moriarty and the “Ex-Gay” RuPaul, and let’s just say that it doesn’t work as she soon ends up in a wonderful relationship with Clea DuVall. The whole thing is a fantastic send-up of the late 90s (and, probably, contemporary) fears of homosexuality, crack-pot theories as to what causes it, and how it can be cured. (It’s not as cruel and punishing as many of the real-world therapies/torture programs, because those just aren’t a laughing matter.)
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Trash or Treasure 