The Tale of Zatoichi

I just recently finished watching all twenty-whatever James Bond movies and wanted a new series to watch, so why not the Zatoichi samurai movies I asked myself, and I said ok, sure, just watch 'em. In this first film of the 26 film saga, Zatoichi, a blind masseuse, shows up to a gambling house. It turns out Zatoichi is basically the Japanese Daredevil (though, hm, it beat Daredevil's creation by a year so I suppose Daredevil is the American Zatoichi) - he may be blind, but he has enhanced other senses and swordsmanship to take over. Anyway, he's one of those swordspeople who realizes killing is bad, m'kay, so he doesn't want to get involved in a big gambling house war, even after he meets a dying samurai named Hirate who befriends him and begs him to fight him. I'll let you guess whether or not these two swordsmasters fight by the end of the film!

RATING: 76%

The Golden Child

Eddie Murphy was on a roll in the '80s, putting out hit after hit.  The Golden Child may have made some money (79 million bucks) but it was a boring, meandering bomb.

Take all the Asian mysticism and kitchy stereotypes of Big Trouble in Little China and throw in a watered down Beverly Hills Cop script and you have an afternoon-waster on your hands.

Eddie Murphy never gets revved up joke-wise and there is complete lack of chemistry between him and Charlotte Lewis.

Rating: 13%

The Vanishing

Jeff Bridges' Barney Cousins is one of the creepier and compelling murderers ever filmed.

In the opening scene, he chloroforms himself to see how long it takes to wake up and then casually writes the result in his notebook.

Sandra Bullock, Kiefer Sutherland and Nancy Travis all do fine jobs; it's not their fault that Bridges rocks his role so hard.

Not exactly date night material, but excellent viewing.

Rating: 93%

The Blair Witch Project

This movie was a disappointment in 1999 and it's a disappointment now. I don't know one person who likes it, and yet it drastically altered the way horror movies were made. Twelve years later and every third horror movie is some found footage bullshit. Oh well! One of them will eventually end up being good, I guess, infinite monkeys etc etc.

RATING: 21%

Wrestlemaniac

Some d-bags are driving around in Mexico looking for the perfect spot to shoot their porn movie. They decide on a ghost town that happens to be inhabited by a deranged former Mexican wrestler played rather stiffly by Rey Mysterio's dad. It's more gross than scary, but not gross enough to satisfy fans of that subgenre. The best thing about this movie is the hotness of Leyla Milani, but she is covered in blood too often for that to be too much of a factor.

Rating: 8%

Dolls

Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator, which is really great, but apparently that was a fluke because this looks and feels like it was directed by a rusty pair of scissors. It's called Dolls and it's a horror movie, so I'll leave the plot for you to guess! One strange phenomenon in the 80s was that most R-rated movies that featured punk-rockers really seemed to hate them, and would have them violently dispatched. I guess all those Agent Orange albums really got to everybody or something.

RATING: 28%

I Was A Teenage Zombie

This is one of those weird shitty movies like Redneck Zombies that although it is bad and was made for no money, it still has a sort of charm that makes it legitimately (non-MST3K style) enjoyable. The plot is some guys accidentally turn their drug dealer into a crazed zombie and they have to stop him from killing all of them. Great post-punk soundtrack don't hurt nobody neither.

RATING: 59%

The Video Dead

Speaking of evil televisions, here's a movie about a haunted television that zombies crawl out of to kill you or be your friend. I sort of thought the fake movie in the movie "Zombie Blood Nightmare" was a well done imitation of Night of the Living Dead, but everything else sucks about this movie. Like, if they don't act scared the zombies just want to hang out and eat chili and go dancing. Also, there's a murder scene but they couldn't afford cop cars or cop costumes so there's just a red flashing light off screen and sound effects of policemen talking and their radios periodically going off. Let's not judge this movie bad because of economic status, though, hasn't Occupy Wall Street taught us anything? Let's judge it bad because of general terribleness.

RATING: 49%

TerrorVision

Dad builds a sweet satellite for his family of carictatures. Little does he know that it becomes a receptor for alien garbage, namely a man-eating blob that may or many not be Meatball of ATHF fame's grandpa.

I don't know why people continue to think horror and comedy should be mixed, especially when the jokes are uber lame. TerrorVision looks like a B-52s music video mixed with something a beginner's acting class would produce two weeks in.

If you can make it through the painfully awful setup to the actual monster part, consider yourself a trooper.


Rating:2%

Black Belly Of The Tarantula

As you can imagine, this movie doesn't really live up to the awesome title, as is the case with so many giallo movies (the best titled of course being Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key). Oh well! The plot is there is a serial killer and a cop has to stop him. I think the tarantula is a metaphor, but I was reading and there was a nature video about spiders at some point when I looked up. Also, I got really excited when I saw that Ennio Morricone did the music but it sucks too, so don't get your hopes up like me is what I'm saying.

RATING: 31%

Poltergeist III: Oh God Just Kill Me

Ok guys I guess I was wrong about Poltergeist II being so shitty because this is the shit of the shit. The plot is Carol Anne lives with her aunt and uncle in a fancy new apartment building but the ghosts come back, oh no! There's a psychologist who claims the little girl is hypnotizing everybody, and lots of mirrors, and a really awful non-Jerry Goldsmith synthesizer score. It all adds up to awful, so you gotta feel extra bad that the little girl died during production. Whelp, the world's cruel and empty, and if you want to experience a little bit of that cruelty just watch this and see what kind of feelings you have.

RATING: 6%

The Others

I always thought of this movie as a rip off of The Sixth Sense, but I never actually saw it until today. It's pretty good I guess - the twist was ruined for me years ago, but it sounded pretty interesting because of it. One thing that sucks *SPOILERS* is that how come Nicole Kidman and her kids get to keep being the owners of the house and the servants have to keep being servants even though they're all dead? That's a pretty shitty afterlife imho.

RATING: 59%

From Dusk Til Dawn

This is the first R-Rated movie I saw in the theater. At the time I was like "Awesome, people getting shot in the head, titties, and vampires!" Now I am like "Uggggghhhhhhhh *dies*." It embodies all of the worst elements of 90s action movies, from terrible rock soundtracks to dialogue that sounds ripped off from Pulp Fiction (duh) to bad CGI to Juliette Lewis, but I guess I need to give it a little bit of credit for being a crime movie that all of a sudden turns into a vampire movie (spoilers).

RATING: 33%

Poltergeist II: The Other Side

Do you like stories where ghosts and skeletons and racist Indian caricatures appear? Then this is the movie for you! Nah, it's actually pretty bad in case you couldn't tell. The plot is the family from the way good first movie still has ghosts, and also HR Giger designed vomit worms. So then they get rid of them through some kind of spells and also grandma's angel, ain't it grand?

RATING: 38%

The House Of The Devil

Everybody was talking a whole bunch about how this movie from 2009 is great, it's totally like a great 80s horror movie, man. Well, let's be real about 80s horror movies for a second - most of them are basically the worst. They're not as bad overall as 90s horror movies, but you gotta sift through a whole lotta Deadly Friends to find the gems. Anyway - The House Of The Devil is as good as one of the better mediocre 80s horror movies, and it has a real orchestra soundtrack and no Avid farts so I think it gets some major pointage there. The plot is a college student goes to a house to babysit but be careful because I bet I know whose house that is!

RATING: 60%

Monkey Shines

A monkey licks blood of a man's mouth, quadrapelic sex, a mother bathes her thirty year old son; you will find all this and more in the very creepy Monkey Shines.
This particular George A. Romero film is far less gory than his zombie fare, but as a whole, the movie experience is really moving.
Pretty impressive making a grown man scared of a capuchin monkey. Props to you, Mr. Romero.

Little Otik

A woman pretending a twig is her baby is how you say...creepy. The twig becoming alive, turning into a monster and eating the townsfolk adds up to excellent and enthralling creeptastic Czech cinema.

Rating:85%

Johnny Suede

At times, triptastic, other times deeply funny, all the while saturated with cool. Catherine Keener does her usual routine and Brad Pitt gives one of his most underrated performances. Cameos by Samuel L. Jackson and Nick Cave are the icing. The scene where Brad Pitt and his roomie go over the pros and cons of moving in with a girlfriend is in itself worth the price of admission.

Rating: 93%

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

An atypical robbery story with a Hitchcockian vibe. If you don’t mind loathing every character in a movie, your enjoyment of this tense, sharp film will not be impeded. Meaty performances by all involved. Seeing Marisa Tomei without clothes is not exactly a drawback.


Rating: 88%

Waiting for "Superman"

Waiting for "Superman" is an Oscar nominated documentary about public education in America. Though I can't vouch for how accurate it might be, having never gone to school in the US, it is a well-made documentary. The use of twinkly piano music and images of disappointed children will probably make you feel bad, but Waiting for "Superman" doesn't seem to be going for an all-out weep-a-thon. While some might argue that the documentary is biased towards charter schools, it's likely that most will agree that there is room for improvement in public education. Also, children are, like, our future and stuff, or something.

Rating: 73%

(Image from thebabycupcakes.blogspot.com)