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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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
I took another chance on a Sexagenarian classic of cinema, to see if it holds up as well as it did when I saw it aged 8, and the answer is “Not really, but it did look pretty”. Obviously frontloading a review with that information is going to cut down on the number of people reading on, but after this movie mucked me around for 86 minutes it would be unfair to not cut to the chase here.
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It’s sometime in the future, approximately a couple of years after the environmental apocalypse, and due to overwhelming personal debt generated by the Baby-Boomers, America is now owned by a variety of other nations. Obviously, that makes no sense, but neither does a movie’s antagonists traveling by rollerblade; something that requires the kind of well-maintained streets and pavements post-collapse societies normally don’t offer. Still, this is not a movie that’s going to let such things get in the way of having a good time.
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In the history of films based on video games, Double Dragon will always be the one that people go “oh, they made that? Really?”. It had the misfortune of coming out a year after the first videogame movie, Super Mario Bros, and a month before what is still one of the most heavily promoted, Street Fighter. It also had about a quarter the budget of either, and no big-name stars. But, much like the game itself when I was a kid in the arcade, I had to give it a go.
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It’s another season of Marvel TV, so it’s time to go through the all-important mythos introductions with this first episode. In this case, the titular character is pretty straightforward as Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has been with us since his Marvel cinematic debut with Thor in 2011. He’s charming, arrogant, happy to knife anyone that gets in his way, and his helmet is still both utterly ridiculous and fashionably dashing. The only minor complication is that the Loki we have here is the defeated mischievous god at the end of Avengers Assemble, rather than the emotionally evolved one we saw die in Infinity War. But don’t worry about that, as this is just Marvel Universe 199999, introducing us to the fun multiverse shenanigans that Universe 616 has been dealing with for ages.
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According to the blub that came in the review pack “Redshift #1 is a bleak sci-fi mini-series which can best be described as Lost In Space meets The Expanse”. By the second page, we have a dead mother, a few pages further on we have a sinister Ministry controlling Mars, and by the halfway point we have a story-within-a-story that could have been a depressing gut-kick of a comic within itself. So; yes, it’s nice to have a comic live up to its own hype.
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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
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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I got my copy of this mighty tome back in July 2020, and that it’s taken me this long to feel I can finally give a solid review of its 430 pages, is testimony to how detailed and in-depth it is. Within the 50 information-rich articles is not so much an introduction to Cyberpunk, but more a state-of-the-art snapshot of some of the finest Cyberpunk Studies writing going around. Whilst the writing is not aggressively academic, the concepts and ideas discussed are given a weight and a reverence of serious critical analysis. The articles also demonstrate the most valuable facets of true fans of any genre: the joy of taking apart a favourite topic and evaluating it from every angle and in every light possible. Faults are on display as much as perfections, because it’s a part of the thing being loved, so needs to be part of a whole conversation.
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