Scanner Cop 2: The Showdown (1995) Laxative combat and you!


For a movie that is the sequel to the spin-off of a film that people mostly remember for the exploding head sequence, I shouldn’t have expected much. David Cronenberg had demonstrated his potential as a writer and director with 1981’s body-horror classic Scanners, but by the time this Steve Barnett film came out 14 years later, his entire involvement was as a bit of advertising copy and a small payment. But whilst Scanners: The Showdown fails to be a worthwhile watch by any conventional standards, it does hold some very valuable lessons about how to screw up a decent central premise.
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Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape (2010)

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.


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Prey Of The Jaguar (1996)

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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1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982)

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.


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Gory Gory Hallelujah (2003)


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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The Sisterhood (1988)


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

Infestation (2009)


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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The 5 Uwe Boll Ball Movies Ranked


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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Exterminators Of The Year 3000 (1983)


It would be a lie to say this film was selected purely on its title. The cover and the trailer both suggested that there was a highly enjoyable Mad Max 2 rip-off to be experienced. The expectations were set to “all the violence, all the post-apocalyptic wasteland couture, but with none of the plot getting in the way”. When it became readily apparent that it was an English script performed by a mostly monolingual Italian cast the joy and hope that this was going to be cinematic mayhem, unfettered by any artistic responsibility, was just added to. With the bar set that low, how could we possibly be disappointed?
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X – The Unknown (1956)


When Hammer Films decided to break away from the dramas and comedies that were the staples of their first twenty years of ripping off Ealing Studios, they did so with “The Quatermass Xperiment”; a remake of the 1953 BBC Television series written by Nigel Kneale. The studio was over the moon when it got an X rating for all it’s terror and tension, ensuring that everyone would want to see it and that the press would hate it. Combined with ground-breaking special effects, the cultural excitement of the then-not-even-named “Space Race”, and the marketing genius of putting it in cinemas the same weekend as when the BBCs Quatermass 2 series started, it was an amazing financial success. Thus, Hammer immediately started work on a follow up film, with only the slight snag of Nigel Kneale telling them they couldn’t use any of his work or characters because Hammer had changed so much with the first one.
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