Gory Gory Hallelujah (2003)

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Raggedyman

Pitching itself as “an apocalyptic fairy fail”, and featuring the praise of both Llyod Kaufman (head of Troma Studios and psychotronic cinema royalty) and Richard Elfman (brother of Danny), I had never heard of this film until my father-in-law dropped it off as one of his £1 charity shop finds. Whilst the ridiculous cover drew me in, I was also interested by it being a “Von Piglet Sisters” movie. I wanted to see what director/producer Sue Corcoran and writer Angie Louise could come up with, as female created films are still less uncommon in Bargain Bin genre flicks, so sat down in anticipation and wondered “how crazy could this be?”
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Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Raggedyman

Have you ever wondered to yourself “What would happen if The Dow Chemical Company had a bunch of money it had to spend in Yugoslavia, and decided to make a horror-comedy there so it would get the profits in the USA?”. Well, if so then we have a treat for you in this 1985 Rudy De Luca-written and directed movie that appears to hinge on a pun that also hinges on a 1940s jazz standard! It also also hinges on thinking Transylvania is a country, rather than a region in Romania, and that you don’t really need a script if you have enough talented actors. Continue reading →

Miss Meadows (2014)

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Raggedyman

Katie Holmes, aka “America’s Sweetheart in Dawson’s Creek”, had appeared in a couple of action films before this 2014 Karen Leigh Hopkins-written and directed movie. However, she had never appeared as a protagonist and certainly hadn’t been presented as Charles Bronson in a floral dress. This probably explains why this movie has managed to slip under the radar. Well; that and it being panned by the critics for the high crime of being a bit odd but not in the way they liked.
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The Sisterhood (1988)

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Raggedyman

The post-apocalyptic Mad-Max cash-in genre has always been a fertile ground for questionable cinema, as shown by this being the third of its highly specific kind put through the Trash or Treasure mill. Something about finding a gravel pit, throwing an assortment of fantasy, sci-fi, and BDSM costumes on low-paid actors, and then just having everyone run around whilst things explode for the smallest of reasons instantly creates potential for a good bit of nonsense viewing. So, when the trailer for this Thomas McKelvey Cleaver-written and Cirio H. Santiago-directed 75-minute movie decided to change the rules and be about a bunch of women shitkicking their way through the dark future, hopes were raised for it adding something new to the old clichés. Continue reading →

Debug (2015)

Posted on March 4, 2021 by Raggedyman

This 2014 Canadian sci-fi horror, written and directed by David Hewlett, sets its stall up in the trailer as a medium budget, medium concept bit of midweek fun. It doesn’t suggest anything ground breaking or radical, and it doesn’t lean too heavily on having scooped Jason Momoa for a lead role. For a film that doesn’t have enough critic reviews to get a Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic rating, it arrived into the watch pile with the due fanfare of it just turning up on the “customers have also watched…” rolodex between Jurassic Galaxy and 2099 The Soldier Protocol. Filled with duly tapered expectations, it turned out to continue it’s tepidity by being mildly surprisingly good.
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Ink (2009)

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Raggedyman

Ink is a 2009 indie film; written, directed, executive produced, composed, and edited by Jamin Winans. It’s billed as “a Wonderful Life meets Sin City” and a “high-concept visual thriller”, and is a passion project that tells a story about a mysterious creature called Ink, two mysterious forces battling for the fate of a girl, and the redemption of an ill-fated father. This $250,000 budget film has managed to gain 86 ten-star reviews on IMDB.com since its release, and for the life of me I can’t work out why, because it’s pompous, dull, and irredeemable Trash. I appreciate that it’s harsh to cut straight to the final score, but given how bloated and overlong the film was, I felt I had to restore some kind of cosmic balance. Maybe if you value the ratings given out here then the time saved not reading the rest of the review could make up for the time wasted watching the film. If not, here’s some nice things before the meat of its problems.
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Infestation (2009)

Posted on February 11, 2021 by Raggedyman

It’s always a gamble to seek out and watch movies that are on the margins of quality; they could have their middling, C-grade rating because the work doesn’t gel with that wide an audience, or because the makers were trying something new and exciting and just missed the mark. B+ rated movies are a known quantity, it’s most likely that they are going to be good at what they are doing from the offset, and any issues are just going to be personal preference. D- films are just punishment for punishments’ sake, something you watch for pure snark or irony. But the middle ground is when hitting “play” becomes an adventure in its own right; an exciting land where things can go either way…
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Space Amoeba (1970)

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Raggedyman

The classic Japanese monster movie has a pretty set formula: monster exists, monster causes moderate levels of destruction in far off place, mankind looks at it and goes “Shiiitttt!”, the monster moves to a highly-populated area and causes massive amounts of damage, and mankind somehow pulls its arse out of the monster-induced fire. Whilst this is absolutely perfect plot progression, especially if it has municipal destruction that you can really see the behemoth emote through, sometimes you just want something different. Some kind of large-scale annihilation je ne sais pas to spice things up.
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The 5 Uwe Boll Ball Movies Ranked

Posted on January 27, 2021 by Raggedyman

Before we start, two observations that apply to all of these films and need to be addressed.

Firstly, they all look very good. Both in terms of production values and how they are shot, all of the movies show a surprisingly high level of technical ability within the crew. The cast are, mostly, similarly talented. Whilst there are a couple of bad performances, most are quite good IF you ignore the material they have to deal with. These are multimillion-dollar productions, and they have the look and feel of multimillion-dollar productions that don’t sap your will to watch. As such, any and all criticism has to be placed directly at the feet of the director and producer, Uwe Boll, for the active decision to make such god-awful movies when they could so very easily have made perfectly okay ones.

Secondly, the sex scenes are atrocious. They are not sexy, most of them are not needed, there is next to no chemistry between anyone involved, and even the ones that you can just about accept as part of the plot are excessively long to the point of dullness. These films were obviously made with a predetermined boob quota and the assumption that showing a breast is, in and of itself, erotically charged. The most pointless was in Along In The Dark, as it could have been cut from the film and made zero impact on any of the story even though it involved two of the main characters. The most offensive was in BloodRayne 3; wherein the hero and unconscious heroine in a van taking them to a concentration camp, with zero romantic build-up, decide to have wild, freaky sex because he groped her whilst she was unconscious. Everything else is somewhere between those two points, and all are down to “artistic” decisions Uwe Boll made.
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Category Archives: Film