A no-budget Italian ripoff of Escape from New York. Apparently, this is the sequel to Bronx Warriors so maybe I’m missing some key character details, but this is pretty terrible. The hero looks like The Barbarian Brothers’ younger brother as he runs around, arms daintily off to his side, showcasing his visible panty lines. If anything, this movie should have been more over-the-top with gore and explosions. As it is, it’s repetitive and dull with no consideration for plot or characters. Henry Silva is its only saving grace.
In this crime mystery, Franco Nero plays a police detective whose methods include warrantless entry, lying, threatening, and smacking the living crap out of every woman he meets. He’s our hero. The version I watched on YouTube slipped in and out of Italian but was not completely incomprehensible. Any puzzling aspects were due to the scattershot plotting. Frankly, I was rooting for the various ne’er-do-wells, especially Florinda Bolkan.
This is Ray Harryhausen’s excuse to animate a rampaging T-Rex. The plot is cowboys versus dinosaurs which sounds a lot cooler than the actual end product. The characters are dull and so is the Southwest setting. While I always like me some stop motion animation, it looks especially dated here in a post Jurrasic Park world. Noteworthy: movie makers did not know the sound an elephant makes in 1969.
The guy from the new Star Warses is a card player and gambler who learned his trade after 10 years in military prison. He hooks up with a kid bent on getting revenge on the ex-marine who avoided punishment for war crimes. The card playing and the revenge plot lines are there, but they take a back seat to the characters and the relationships that build between them. This could have gone the route of Tarantino violence or a Mighty Ducks-style sports movie and it avoids both.
This 1961 movie based on the Jules Verne story follows a group of Civil War soldiers who escape from imprisonment in a balloon only to find themselves on a strange island in the Pacific. The first 30 minutes of the movie are excellent and full of tension and excitement as they make their escape. The Bernard Herman score is top-notch. It’s on the island when the film shows its age. The Ray Harryhausen effects are fantastic but the story doesn’t live up to the first act. I mean, there’s a perfect conflict set-up in which a Confederate soldier is part of the mix and one of the Union soldiers is black but nothing is ever made of this. There’s a rock-a-billy haired teen soldier, an 1860’s mini-skirted damsel, and then the greatest cross-over event of the nineteenth century happens with the appearance of the Nautilus submarine from 20,000 Leagues. All-in-all, goofy fun.
The fifth Phantasm mostly revolves around Reggie’s sanity as he slips back and forth between different realities. The Tall Man returns mostly as a cameo (I think the actor died during production) along with a few gas mask dudes and a mortuary dwarf or two. Tall Man must also be shrinking the budgets on these movies because it’s very on-the-cheap with lots of of boring desert and forest locations and corny CGI spheres. The sphere vs. car chase could have been incredible if they had the budget to shoot it in San Francisco, but, alas, it’s back and forth down a straight desert road. I’ll admit that the Road Warrior ending made me very happy, but the rest of this feels like an uninspired fan film.
A very talky horror movie that works on the premise that sound and atmosphere are what brings tension. The end result is very effective albeit a bit hard to keep up with at the beginning. There are a lot of impressive long takes and an ending that pays off while still remaining mysterious.
The make it up as you go horror series continues. Feels much smaller than the last three installments, with limited locations and effects, but there are a few fun sequences involving Reggie. I also enjoyed the inclusion of previously unused Phantasm I footage to make it seem like they planned this bonkers storyline all along.
I love how the Phantasm sequels start off by completely negating the end of the previous film. Each film is not quite as good as the previous one but each manages to have something fun to latch on to. Early in this there’s a great sequence that’s a hilariously gory, R-rated version of Home Alone. These movies so want to be Evil Dead but don’t quite have the budget or talent to rise to that level.
Studio Ghibli animated film about a middle aged woman who apparently is obsessed with her year in fifth grade. During a country farm vacation she has many flashbacks to her time as a 10-year old. These are cute and fun but then the other half the movie is her boring, sad life as an adult.
