For fans of psychotronic cinema there are few things more enticing than forbidden content and establishment outrage, and Jake West and Mark Morris’s 72-minute documentary on the often-oversimplified era of the “Video Nasties” brings both in the bucketful. Information, education, and entertainment abound in this vivid and engaging oral history.
Another month, another batch of movies for you to come along and watch with us.
Is it a reboot? Is it a sequel? Is it an investigation into the mind of the anti-hero, asking the question “can bad people still do good things?”? Who cares: I saw a man get ripped in half by a giant man-shark, in full-frame with slow-mo, and laughed like a hyena while it happened.
The trailer for this film makes it look like an interesting twist on the “special agent on a hijacked plane” school of action movies. Specifically asking the questions “what if the special agent’s child was also on board?” and “what if the special agent was a vampire?”. Whilst I’m sure writer and director Peter Thorwarth could have done that well, I’m just happy he ended up asking enough further questions to justify gluing three movies worth of concept together.
This 1996 low-budget superhero/vigilante movie was picked for the Thursday night Trash Or Treasure watch party because sometimes you just want some light-hearted action nonsense to get in your eyeballs. It had a solid batch of B-Movie headliners and a premise so simple it couldn’t go wrong. Yet what we ended up with was significantly lesser than the sum of its parts.
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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 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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This is probably a redundant observation to make but Lockdown has been a total arse of a time for most people. Yes, measures had to be put in place to limit the spread and impact of Covid; but the lack of social contact has been utterly exhausting. This is addressed head-on in Growth, a 53-page comic by Jenny Allen.
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Trash or Treasure 