The tagline for this is “The antisocial son of an alcoholic father and a bipolar mother grows up in 1960s Ireland”, so forgive me if that and the colour grade on the promo photos meant I went in thinking this would be some overly earnest misery-porn. What we have here is some high-quality bait-and-switch weirdness that simply has to be explored. And, yes, a bit of 60s Ireland misery-porn. Continue reading
In context even this is problematic, which is impressive.
The straplines made me think this was going to be good old fashioned Psycho Santa Slasher, but this is actually a horror story anthology with a Christmas motif and framing device. Which isn’t a problem as that’s prime quality festive family fun in the Super Fortress. Thus we fired up the streaming service and let the intro credits roll.
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Who’s up for a timeless tale of Christmas joy, told with grace and style? Tough, all I’ve got for you today is 60 minutes of badly made insanity, the likes of which can only be found in 60s TV specials. A film so thoroughly low budget that only one of the cast has any credits other than this film, and none of them have face on IMDB. So; yes, this is the good stuff! Continue reading
There is always a joy to watching Lee Marvin act, as you never know what he’s going to do next and you have the sense that him punching you is always a viable option. So, it’s rather fitting that his third to last film has a script that feels the same way. It’s was originally based Jean Herman’s novel of the same name, and then went through three other screenwriters until director Yves Boisset got his hands on it. Needless to say, the director behind the criminally underappreciated sci-fi death-TV masterwork that is Le Prix Du Danger insured that it had social commentary, blunt violence, and an uneasy touch of surrealism. Continue reading
Hey, anyone interested in an okayish mild-horror time filler designed to get everyone involved paid and some time on the SyFy Channel filled? Well, do I have a very middle-of-the-road bit of inoffensive tepid entertainment for you! Because much like the real world of bulk movie production, not everything you haven’t heard of can be joyfully bad or outrageously crazy. A lot of it just does the job it’s supposed to.
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This had an enigmatic title, came from a noted Italian genre director, is being marketed under the normal quite crazy Shameless banner, and had a synopsis that sounded rather spicy. So as I was in the mood to try out something with a bit more European flavour than normal, and it didn’t look like yet another giallo slasher, it was worth a punt.
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Metamorphoses (Japanese: 星のオルフェウス, Hepburn: Hoshi no Orufeusu, “Orpheus of the Stars”) is a 1978 Japanese animated anthology film, produced by Sanrio. Directed by Takashi Masunaga and based on Ovid’s book of the same name, it took 3 years and 170 Hollywood animators to make. But that bombed, so 7 minutes were trimmed, a Peter Ustinov narration got added, and the whole thing got re-edited around a disco soundtrack. Did that pull its fat out of the fire? Well…
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As is the tradition, the final movie of 2022 put through the Trash or Treasure group watching was the Christmas-themed low-budget shonk-fest with the craziest premise that could be found. This time we were promised monster elves, Nazis, and some chap called Dan Haggerty. There was also the prospect of impressive hairdos, because it’s from the late 80s and that Ozone Layer wasn’t going to massacre itself.
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Apparently, the title of this film was chosen as people kept on mistaking the original 1997 film by writer/director Michael Cooney for the 1998 Michael Keaton film also called Jack Frost. That was a touching romantic comedy, the one we’re interested in is a nonsense story about a killer snowman. Then again, both of the snowmen on the covers look sinister and I haven’t seen either of them so maybe they are as interchangeable as Hallmark movies. Continue reading
Trash or Treasure 