Fear - 1996

Fear might be my most popular actors movie review yet?  Hm.  Mark Wahlberg, Reese Witherspoon, William Peterson, Alyssa Milano, Amy Brenneman, these people are all pretty well known for one reason or another, and the two leads are one Oscar nominated and one Oscar winner.  And the director James Foley is currently involved in House of Cards on Netflix and directed well known drama movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

Fear is such a basic name, bland, unassuming.  This movie could be about anything, it practically screams out at you.  It really fits this movie, though, and I could not rename this if I tried.  But it could've been named something like "the crazy dude" or something, cause that's really what it's got to offer.

Mark Wahlberg plays David, who is kinda the average mystery man.  Tall dark and handsome, David is a mystery and there's nothing that girls like more in movies like this.  Reese Witherspoon is playing a 17 year old girl who lives with her dad, brother in law, and stepmom.  Everything is kinda awkward with this family unit, but minor conflicts that are abundant step aside once Marky Mark enters the picture.  Reese W, playing Nicole, is just the whatever blond girl. A virgin, not super interested in men really, but full of pep and likability, she meanders along as the good girl you can easily watch until she is at a bar and spots David.

They lock eyes, and later when they first talk at a rave, David comes off as much deeper of a mystery.  He seems like a good guy though, as he gets Nicole safely out of the rave when a fight breaks out.  Then it's the slow dropping of the facade he put on for Nicole:  he beats up her friend just for innocently touching her, he hits Nicole (seemingly accidentally) but there is doubt, Nicole's father has this really bad feeling about David, etc.  You know what I just realized:  this movie fits into that 90's genre I made up, the teen sex thriller.  It's not the average one, cause it follows a innocent and likable female, but it is a twist on that 90's classic plotline.

Things go about as you expect and soon Nicole knows something is very wrong with David.  But the problem here is David.  Now I know that you should never over explain a character and sometimes it is enough to just have them act crazy, but there has to be something to make it make sense, cause otherwise you just watch as a character gets more and more extreme and you don't really know why.  I mean we as the audience knew what the dad knew from day one:  this guy's bad news.  But we spend so long with David playing innocent that when he turns bad, it's like there is just zero explanation.  It heavily relies on David just being super crazy and never once does it say, wait, why is he so fucking nuts?

The movie is very forgettable, not what I'd call good, and very popcorny for the most part.  It's the kind of movie you'd watch with a potential girlfriend, so she'd cling to your arm during the tense parts, and you'd both feel awkward during the sex parts, but you'd hopefully make a good joke about it once it was over, then you'd feel awesome about yourself and wonder if maybe you were gonna get laid that night.  I saw it....night before last.  Yeah.  August 7th.  And I did get laid that night.  So, maybe I owe that to Fear.  

It's not the worst thing ever, but they also decided to litter the soundtrack with awful 90's music and the movie feels extremely dated.  I know it's 20 years old, but I've seen 80's movies that aged better than this.  It's going to continue to not age well, be very indicative of the era in which it was made, and be forgotten.  But for trying, and the cast, it gets a solid 2 B movie stars.

Ticks - 1993

Also known as Infested and as C2 Killer Insect.

I recently rewatched this 1993 Brian Yuzna produced campy B movie with my wife, and once again I did not regret seeing this animal attack/normally small animal becomes huge film.  And I won't be the first to point out that if it had been named Killer Insect for good, the title would've been wrong as Ticks aren't insects.  But, whatever dude.

Seth Green stars in this movie as one of several problem kids that are sent to a summer camp to get better.  Apparently, all it takes is spending some time outside with other problem kids, doing activities such as camping, fishing, hiking, etc, and all the problems just melt away.  That's the idea behind this movie anyway, and the problem kids don't put up too much of a fight so maybe they're right.  While they're at this retreat, marijuana growers are simultaneously giving steroids to their plants to make them grow bigger, the steroids infect some ticks, and the ticks grow bigger.  It's your classic setup to a genuinely fun monster movie.

As I've stated numerous times, I love Brian Yuzna and I don't know why his films aren't better known.  He didn't direct, only produced, but this movie has a lot of his sort of elements in it.  There's the creature effects first of all; super good, everything is slimy and wet and gross looking.  There's Clint Howard in a small role, there's a couple minor tensions that come up beside the whole ticks thing, it's a movie that is really well paced and exciting even without the giant ticks thing going on.

Another thing I love that always makes me happy is when a movie that could've easily, EASILY been PG-13 goes for and gets and R rating.  It's like saying "fuck you" to all the little kiddies out there, Like, we could've easily trimmed out a couple parts of bad language and then you would've been able to watch this movie also, but, nope, we're keeping it, you don't get to see our movie.  I imagine it's rated R for the drug references, the language, maybe the blood.  But the drug languages are very minimal, they only swear like 10 times, and the blood is surprisingly low for this type of movie.  So they could've done it PG-13 with no real effort, I think.

Seth Green, Clint Howard, the other actors had all and have all been in real movies, this movie picked it's cast well.  The actors do a good job of having fun and putting this movie over.  Then there's the effects, as I mentioned earlier.  The little ticks are awesome looking.  Disgusting, real looking, slimy and deadly.  They look tremendously awesome.  When a dude or two gets fucked up, the makeup effects and prosthesis work is great, and it makes you feel both grossed out and it makes you laugh to see these guys go through the suffering they do.  There's a black guy that gets bit like 60 times by these things, and he just looks super messed up.  It's great.

Ticks is one of these that has a cult following, but not as strong as some of those other movies out there.  It's well paced, shot, directed, and executed, and deserves it's spot.  But ultimately, like so many projects which Yuzna was involved with, it just doesn't seem to have the awareness I think it deserves.  Cause I think it gets 4 stars.

Frankenstein Island - 1981

Holy shit, HOW is this movie from 1981?!  Wow, this movie looks, feels, smells like the late 60's. It's even got John Carradine in it, and that guy really got to one age and then just looked the same for the next 30 years.  But, 1981 it is and no clue anywhere online to show if it had been filmed previous to that.  This one is a genuinely old feeling movie.

We start with seemingly random scenes of hot air balloons.  Alright, that's unique.  I mean, how could you not like hot air balloons, right?  Well, when the balloonists land on an island, and go about exploring, and find a colony of weirdos there, you know you're in for a ride.  There's a woman turning people into sunglasses wearing zombies, there's an Edgar Allen Poe quoting prisoner played by Cameron Mitchell, there's a tribe of sexploited bikini wearing girls that don't really do much throughout the movie, there's Frankenstein, and then of course there's the ghost(?) of Frankenstein's creator (John Carradine) who chants "the power" a whole lot. Yeah, this movie makes tons of sense.

This movie was just a tad overdone and confusing, there's just so much going on the whole time and yet it's simultaneously very boring and bland.  It's great riffing material though and the pace is quick, so it's easy to watch.  It's obviously stretching a thin budget, but you have to give it props for having two major actors, and filming at a variety of neat locations including Mexico.

John Carradine has an extremely small part, like so many of his roles, and so many of the other characters are interchangeable to the point of getting them confused.  And it's filmed in that style where it touches on one story going on, then jumps to another somewhere else, another somewhere else.  It's not linear, where we follow the characters as they go on.  So it is slightly confusing and you should absolutely not pay it too much attention otherwise you'll probably just get mad at it.

It's the perfect movie to be super trashed while watching, in fact don't watch it without drugs and alcohol, because then you can have those awesome moments where you declare "I have no idea what's happening with this movie."  It's instantly riff-able, mockable, and hurts, but is prime grade A smelly cheese.  For riffability and general nonsense, it get's 3 solid B movie stars.

Legacy of Rage - 1986

I liked Brandon Lee.  And not just because of his most well known movie The Crow.  Although that helps of course and it's impossible not to mention Brandon Lee and not talk about The Crow.  The Crow was one of those movies made for a specific type of person at a specific time and it is a definitive 90's flick.  It personifies the 90's about as perfectly as The Matrix.  I love the 90's, obviously, because I was in my young teenage years during them and they fuckin kicked ass.  No stupid internet or smart phones to ruin everything, awesome dark kids shows and movies, it was the best time to be a young person.

If you are a fan of an actor, director, writer, whatever the case may be, you should see the stuff they make.  That's what I do.  If I enjoy the films of someone, then I'll be looking that shit up on IMDb in a heartbeat to see what else they did.  Brandon Lee's filmography is very small, he was in 8 movies, 2 of them in very minor roles or cameo appearances, so 6 real roles.  Of those 6 roles, 4 of those movie covers feature Brandon Lee showing his fists.  So, what I'm trying to say is the dude was in action movies.

Legacy of Rage was Brandon Lee's only film shot in a foreign country by a foreign director.  It was Brandon's only Chinese film, and the only one that was filmed in the traditional Hong Kong format.  This format was popular with Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee and it's formula is something like:  good guy is thoroughly good - all around morally good and has everything going for him.  Good guy gets mixed up with bad gang.  Bad gang hurts him or his family, closes his restaurant, whatever the case may be.  Despite not wanting to hurt anyone, good guy breaks down and commits the crime of seeking revenge.  In the end good guy defeats everyone but is now broken because he hurt people.  Sometimes he'll be ok, but sometimes he takes a vow to become a monk, get's arrested, or other endings like that.  Also, one weird minor other thing:  actors are usually playing themselves, or at lease someone with the same name.

The story this time is that Brandon Lee, playing a guy named Brandon, is implicated in the death of a drug dealer.  Really it was Brandon's friend Michael (played by Michael Wong) who killed the drug dealer, and he implicates Brandon cause he wants to get with Brandon's fiancee.  Brandon gets sent to jail for 8 years for the murder, still unaware he's been framed by Michael.  Michael doesn't hook up with the girl, as she moves to Brazil with some weird old guy that likes her.  Brandon gets out of jail and learns that Michael set him up, so now it's two former best friends, and Brandon wants revenge...

It all culminates in some fights and some minor twists but in the end it's just sort of your average whatever film.  Nothing to look up time and time again, it's very formulaic.  I'll give it two stars, mostly for Brandon Lee.

The Perfect Host - 2010

Well another movie I wasn't going to include...not much to say here.

David Hyde Pierce (DHP) plays a psycho dude who has a criminal in his house.  At first the criminal looks in charge and DHP is just some scared guy in a suit, turns out DHP drugged the guy's wine and once he wakes up he realizes DHP is f'in crazy.  DHP sees imaginary people, has a scrapbook of people he's killed, etc.

The movie strongly relies on DHP making an utter fool of himself and I can only imagine that these people had seen or at least knew of his role in Frasier, and wanted to see him acting weird.  There is little other reason to see this movie, actually, other than to see DHP act like a buffoon, and the scene where he has sex with a figment of his imagination.  He's a decent enough actor and believable, but it pushes that crazy card a bit too far and ends up just being kind of stupid.

It wants to be a black comedy, funny in it's portrayal of an utter psycho, but instead it just comes off as a bad script.  Throughout the film it flows a little bit jerky at times, but it's not until the end when you realize that it's one of those movies where the plot is laid out in just such a way where it's like, the characters in the film must've known exactly what the other would do 10 steps ahead of them.

There's one example where the criminal John escapes DHP and grabs a sword off the wall to stab DHP with.  Turns out the sword is fake.  So DHP knew that John would go for that, versus say a kitchen knife or steak knife, fire poker, etc?  WTF.  The plot is one of those where if any one character did one single thing differently, every one else's plan wouldn't have worked out.  It's a plot of convenience.

For keeping me interested for about 10 minutes out of its 90+, I give it a star.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep - 1966

More commonly known as Godzilla Versus the Sea Monster

Well, I just did like 30 seconds of research to try and find out if the Japanese suffix "ra" had any special meaning, but I couldn't find it.  I mean, I just find it slightly odd that in Japanese Godzilla is Gojira, then there's Ebirah, Mothra, Ghidorah, Hedorah, even Gamera fits the bill.  But, fuck you internet, you decided I don't get to know.  So now my loving audience doesn't get to know either.

One thing I thought early on in this movie was that it's kind of strange how they've treated Godzilla's breath weapon as this movie franchise has evolved.  In the first movie Gojira the big bad lizard uses his breath lots of times, destroying houses and tanks and people, and it's badass.  Then as time goes on he slowly uses it less and less.  In this movie, which was the 7th in the franchise, he uses it early on against Ebirah.  In fact it's the first thing he does.  Yet in later sequels, he would wait and only use his breath seemingly as a last resort.  One thing I thought of just now was that maybe in the Showa era when Godzilla was good they minimized his breath to make him appear less savage and or had a fake reason like that it was bad for humans or something.

Additionally, they wanted to build up to his breath in later installments of course.  It's like in the 98 film where the breath is not even existent, it's more like him blowing oxygen on a flame, it doesn't come from him at all.  And the breath probably is the most "unrealistic" aspect of the giant mutant dinosaur lizard thing, so they also probably didn't want to focus on it as time went on.

In this movie, Godzilla was supposed to be King Kong.  This traces back to Toho's desire to put all sorts of other monsters in their kaiju films, they wanted to use Frankenstein in Godzilla versus King Kong, they wanted to bring Kong back several times, and this was one of them.  Kong would've made more sense, especially at the part near the end of this film where Godzilla randomly attacks Mothra even though they're supposed to be friends.  I love Toho's approach there by the way.  Um, so we didn't get Kong, so should we maybe change the script since having Godzilla attack Mothra makes no sense?  Fuck it, no one will notice, just have Godzilla attack Mothra anyway.

I also love the poster:

Featuring Mothra!  Who is in the film for all of 1 minute and definitely is not bigger than Godzilla!  And who really does nothing that important anyways!  

Oh and by the way, that weird brownish thing is the main villain...

Ebirah aka the Sea Monster is a giant lobster, who is hanging out near an island being all destructive at the beginning of this film.  He is semi-friends with the island folk, who avoid him with a yellow powder that makes him go away.  He sinks some ships and generally is just a giant lobster while in the meantime some people on the island stumble across Godzilla who's knocked out under a mountain on the island.  They use a lightning rod to revive him, and when he wakes he fights Ebirah.  The two monsters are soon joined by Mothra, and the island is slowly becoming unstable.

As far as fights go, this movie is extremely minimal.  Two fights happen, both are fairly short, and Ebirah (who does NOT win, spoiler alert) barely even looks like a threat against Godzilla.  If anything this movie kind of comes across more of an adventure movie about the humans with a side plot about monsters thrown in awkwardly.

Another thing, this is my least favorite Godzilla suit.  Or one of them at least.  Mostly it's the eyes. it looks like he's always looking up.  And they're too big and goofy looking.  It was only used in two movies, some small scenes in others, but it's easy to see why it was abandoned.  After all this was also the suit that did that retarded dance in Invasion of the Astro Monster.  

This is a far from necessary Godzilla film, not necessarily one to avoid at all costs, but don't expect a lot from it.  I'll give it 3 stars though, cause it's still entertaining, watchable, fast paced, and has a good looking lobster in it.

Godzilla: Final Wars - 2004

This movie review will be partially written while watching the actual movie Godzilla Final Wars.  This movie was made in 2004, and has that feeling of something that was influenced by the post-Matrix world it came out in.  Briefly all the action movies had to spice up their camera movement, martial arts action, and craziness innovative factor to try and show that what The Matrix did could easily be imitated.

Another thing this movie falls victim to is way stereotyping their characters, but in that "we did it on purpose" way.  This is when you have it for the sake of comedy and easy accessibility, it's like when in a teen movie you dress the white guy up like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, have him make weed references, and make him the "comic relief".  This movie does the spoiled kid with chocolate smeared all over his mouth, it does the pimp black guy who drives a pink Cadillac and wears fur, etc.  They aren't funny, as you can obviously guess, but merely annoying.

No wonder there wasn't a Godzilla movie for 10 years.

In this installment, humans have these mutants that have some blood from the monster Gigan.  These guys are super good fighters and whatnot, and they are going to be super useful because all the sudden monsters appear from all over the globe, destroying cities like New York, Melbourne, Paris, and of course Tokyo among others.  It's an extremely high budget, overly stylistic film directed by Ryuhei Kitamura who had directed action films Alive and Versus.  There's the good and the evil mutants, and we follow a couple of them whilst the monsters appear, then disappear, then reappear.  This is the doing of the aliens, and it turns out that the only way to stop these monsters is by un-burying Godzilla, who is in Antarctica.

There's a stereotypical beefy white soldier dude played by MMA fighter Don Frye, who I've seen fight in Pride FC and UFC.  He's a decent fighter at times, but a terrible actor in this.  Of course, he doesn't have much to work with since his lines are all straight out of a cliches book.  He is an American general or something living in Japan and a member of the military.  What I love is while he speaks in English, everyone else speaks in Japanese....So either they can understand English but not speak it, or he can understand Japanese and not speak it?  Or actually, it would have to be both!  What the fuck, who made that decision?  I've seen that problem in other stuff as well, most notably in the recent Daredevil Netflix show.

Did I mention that horrible rock band Sum 41 has a song in this movie?  And it hurts about as much as you can imagine.  When Godzilla isn't acting like Gigan and some giant spider are barely even there, he is mostly just wandering around looking cool.  It's very short on the kaiju action for the most part and the humans are the focus for the majority of the film.  The kaiju fights do however give an opportunity to see Godzilla kick some major ass of all the monsters (almost all at least) and we do get to cheer for him if that's your goal of watching a movie like this.

The CGI in the movie is generally bad, very cartoonish, and it looks like some bad cut scene from a Halo game or something.  It sort of matches the general feel of the flick, though, in the "this movie kinda sucks" feeling that is.  It's just hard to be a Godzilla fan, especially when my favorites are the 60, 70's and 80's ones, and have this movie be part of the legacy.  It feels extremely dated for being only 11 years old too.  I mean, NONE of these actors are still in stuff, the director has been forgotten to Western audience, it feels way overly stylized in the worst of ways, worse than any Matrix ripoff or sequel.  It has terrible dubbing and watching it with subtitles is pointless since you should not even attempt to take it semi-seriously.

Despite Zilla getting killed and put in his proper place, this movie still only gets 1 star, and that's only given for the occasional kaiju coolness.

Eyes Behind The Stars - 1978

There I was, in my work clothes, drunk on Hurricane High Gravity (followed by a gin and tonic, followed by a blue Hawaiian), watching this movie, and realizing, well, it wasn't that good.  Why do these things happen to me?!  I wasn't paying attention, to be honest, not in the least, but this movie truly didn't even try to keep me entertained.  It made good background noise though, I will give it that.  I also have experienced this before, but it was really strong with this movie:  the inescapable question as I watched, "what the hell movie is this?" This is what happens when you're drunk, you own a 50 sci fi movie DVD collection, you pick a disc at random and you press play.  I had a 4 movie choice of what to watch, I picked one with a long name, instantly forgot what it was called, and spent the next 40 minutes wondering "what the hell movie did I pick?"  because I was too lazy to get up and check. Turns out this movie was called "Eyes Behind the Stars".  Huh.  Who knew?  Also, I thought I had watched about 40 minutes of this, turns out it was closer to an hour.  That's strange, usually movies feel like more time has gone by, not less. Anyways, it's a mystery movie of sorts, it doesn't play out like a sci fi movie - it's more just got a sci fi twist.  Also, it is sort of an adventure movie, as the main character Tony escapes from this evil group of people associated with aliens.  Oh I forgot the plot is about aliens living among humans and wiping their memory.  Yeah, that's important to know.  Also, important to know this movie was Italian (ah, Italy) and was seriously dubbed.  I mean, seriously.  So bad.  Laughable.  But in a good way.  I also have to say that the aliens in this movie were fucking fantastic.  I love things that are genuinely original, and they were definitely that.  Obscure, bizarre, these are also good descriptive words for them. This movie wasn't what I'd expected, of course this was going back to my sci fi boxset as I somewhat eluded to earlier.  So I went in expecting fun action and sci fi, especially since this disc that the movie was on also held my fave "The Day Time Ended".  But what I got was kind of a mystery thriller, instead, not heavy on the sci fi.  For what it is it's not bad, being drunk made me extremely short attention spanned, and I was not ready for the slow build this movie has.  If I was still in my amateur phase with this blog, I'd go back and rewatch this movie like I did with Stanley, but I'm at the point where I don't give a fuuuuck, so nope, this movie won't get rewatched any time soon. My parents are probably so proud of me. This movie is not okay to drink to, if you're going to smoke make sure it's the relaxing kind of weed, and don't you ever think of showing this to friends late at night.  Put this on if you're patient, and have plenty of time to kill.  I don't want to go on about this movie too much, suffice to say it's just another forgettable flick, for the most part. Revisit 3/28/17 I did rewatch this film, and man, I was just way to drunk for it, as I guessed.  Its a slow moving mystery film similar to Footsteps on the Moon, actually.  It is also quite progressive, decently paced, and a genuinely freaky film.  You're not even introduced to the main character until 17 minutes in, and by that time I had probably already decided I hated it when I was drinking. The film has some small, minor omissions and it's not for those who want everything spelled out, that's for sure.  However, it is really bizarre, highly drugged da fuck up, and worth a viewing if you like mystery sci fi.  It's a bit long, and sometimes it tends to lag, and it has a ton of dialogue, but with some small cleaning up this coulda been a five star mystery sci fi.  Of course, it is 1978 and the pacing was average for the time.  So really, it's pretty close to perfect.  It works as a mystery, not as much a sci fi, which was why I might not have been ready for it when I was drunk. I'll give it a retroactive 4 stars.

They Came From Beyond Space - 1967

There are often many, many attempts by different companies to cash in on a popular genre or movement within film.  Why, just recently we had dozens of sci fi movies making their presence known after the success of Gravity, and there's always room for one more retarded Marvel movies to come out and be exactly like the others.  So, I present to you They Came From Beyond Space (TCFBS), which when it premiered as part of a double feature, was called, "the two worst films the company ever produced".

This movie was a difficult one, and I don't mean difficult to watch or difficult to rate.  I just mean it felt unsure of what it was trying to be from 10 or so minutes in.  First of all, it looks okay, despite the fact it was extremely low budget.  However, that might be because it reuses sets and props from a Doctor Who movie that was also made this same year.  So, if you are a fan of the old Doctor Who movies and TV shows, there's some trivia.  

TCFBS begins with some meteors that appear to be infecting people somehow.  At first the influence is simply thought to be a disease, called the crimson plague, however it's victims seem to be portraying odd behavior.  We follow Robert Hutton as Dr. Curtis Temple, a man who has a metal plate in his skull, and is thus unaffected by the meteors influence.  His fiancee, however, is affected, and soon she goes into isolation, to the point of keeping armed guards and an electric fence around her property (which is where the meteors are).  Temple breaks into the compound to try and figure out what's going on, but he's not going to like what he finds...

TCFBS is relatively simple, it's not hard to watch by any means, yet it still felt like a chore to get through.  I don't know if I could say exactly why, but it's yet another one of these movies I'm inevitably going to give 1-2 stars and ramble on about pacing, which again, was a problem here.  Anyone else feel like we're stuck in a time loop?  The pacing does suck though, to be honest.  I just feel like, if you reach that point in a movie where you look away, casually interested in the dirt under your fingernails, the movie is not doing it's job.  

Mostly it's build.  Hell, the dude doesn't even break into the compound until well around the hour mark.  Being 85 minutes long that doesn't leave a lot of time for things to happen.  He breaks in, and that's when it does finally get "good".  I'm obviously using the word good in a relative term here.  It's not like, 2001: A Space Odyssey "good" or anything.  More like, "Hey, I don't want to turn this shit off and break my computer" type good.  There's all sorts of weird ass random elevator scenes, cool vaults, and you get to watch some 8-5 business-man looking dude in a tan jacket walking around pretending he's interested in random shit.  That's the relative "good" you get here.

The movie is instantly forgettable, indescribably inane, and torturous.  I don't recommend it unless you really, really like guys in tan jackets.  That's an extremely small demographic (I hope).

Death Machine - 1994

Ah, the future.  The future is going to be cool.  I for one am really looking forward to the distant year of 2003, when we'll have killer machines, man-machine hybrids, and awesome industrial warehouses everywhere.  Yes, the future looks bright in Death Machine, which is in no way related to the other Death Machines movie I rated a bit ago.

Death Machine is a near perfect bad movie.  Near perfect because it's not, but oh man is it a bad movie.  Not only is it bad, it was directed by the guy who basically made Sean Connery stop acting in films, Stephen Norrington would later go on to direct The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was of course Connery's last role.  Norrington came from a history of special and creature effects on such successful films as Alien, and this movie is a first hand demonstration of why skill in one area (effects) does not always translate to another area (writing and directing).

This movie is bad in many, many ways. First of all, the characters.  If you're going to homage other film makers, at least be KIND OF smart about it.  It takes us out of the film if it's painfully obvious what you're going for.  So the characters here are Jack Dante (director Joe Dante homage), Scott Ridley (Ridley Scott homage) Sam Raimi (Sam Raimi homage), John Carpenter (figure that one out for yourself).  Yeah, brilliant.  There's also a rather nonsensical Street Fighter reference near the end that hurt to hear.

I was watching it and thinking, though it was bad, I miss the type of films where the whole thing took place in some industrial looking warehouse.  Like, they had one building in which to shoot, and so by adding some tubes, wires, fog and lights, they make it look like this bizarre futuristic building, and the whole thing is shot there.  There's other movies where they just take place in some random warehouse somewhere.  I love that shit, and I regret that movies these days are too ambitious to bring back the 90's aesthetic of filming in some weird-ass warehouse somewhere.  That shit was awesome, and it looks great.  Especially when there's like, randomly blasting fire, giant industrial metal doors, a freezer room, and some dark dank basement...man that shit is awesome.

Okay, the plot is a who cares thing; it's your basic follow the main girl as she uncovers the fact the company she works for has been creating machines, and man-machine hybrids.  They're evil of course, run by Brad Dourif in a typically insane performance.  There's a lot of setup going into the pretty simple you-know-exactly-how-this-movie-goes plotline, and it could have used some editing, but basically its man vs machine and all sorts of fights and chases in the industrial warehouse ensue.

Rachel Weisz was also in a microscopic role.  Nice.

This movie was fun, but also not that great and took too long to get through.  I checked at least three times to see how much was left, watching it on Amazon instant play.  I couldn't tell you exactly where it went wrong, but the pacing is very slow, and there's just a lot of unnecessary dialogue and build to something that ultimately we knew was going to happen ten minutes into the film.  The acting is inconsistent, sometimes okay and sometimes horrible.  The effects are okay but extremely 90's and dated, the stop motion animation in parts is done in way too jerky of a fashion.

All in all, it's fun but not THAT fun, it'd be okay to put on if you like bad action movies or maybe Terminator rip-offs, but I don't generally recommend it.  I'll give it 2.5 stars though, cause at least it didn't have that horrible stink of a bad bad movie all over it.

Demon Seed - 1982

Demon Seed, eh?  Demon Seed.  And no, I'm not in fact reviewing the 1977 film with Julie Christie.  This is the other Demon Seed, this one's alternate titles are Demon Rage and Satan's Mistress.  Yeah, that's the movie.  I added this to my Amazon Instant queue because the poster looked cool and the plot was about a woman having sex with a ghost.  Sounded okay enough to me to warrant a watch.  After all, I've seen movies that had absolutely nothing going for them:  no cool poster, no sex, nothing at all.

What I'm trying to say is that I just decided to see it, and walk you through a little bit of how I decide these things.  Free is always better, cool artwork is good, sex and nudity are good, actual actors are always a good sign.  I make this sound a little complex but it's not.  When you're a fan of movies there is nothing that you need to make you watch.  You watch cause it's what you do.

Demon Seed played out like a sort of mystery-thriller with a supernatural twist, and I at one point had to think while I was watching it, what were they going for with this film?  I earlier talked about in my review of Unforgettable, how in the 90's the genre of the sex-thriller became pretty popular, and I would argue that this film is a logical precursor to that genre.  It has a little bit of 70's charm and was influenced by the success of other supernatural stories, so that makes it different, but for most of the movie it's a sex thriller with a drama and even romance twist.

This movie stars two ex-James Bond girls, Britt Ekland from The Man with the Golden Gun, and Lana Wood from Diamonds are Forever.  I've long maintained that even though Bond girls are well known, and there a few exceptions to this rule, most of them don't have much of a career after that, or at least aren't known for other roles.  They are here showing off their best assets, and it's not their acting, but rather their large chests.  Yes, this movie does have plenty of nudity, and it's pretty common in the beginning, especially with Lana Wood.

You see, the plot as I said involves ghost sex.  This woman in a fizzled out relationship is getting fucked by a ghost.  She seems to go through this with no particular concern, and the movie just starts out with this happening, leaving us to wonder if this ghost sex had been happening for a while or if the time we saw was the first.  Either way she likes the sex, but is freaked out by it understandably.  Soon enough she's hiding out from her husband, going away to her bedroom while there's guests over, etc, all to let the ghost do her.

The ghost is visible to her, sometimes, he's a weird looking foreign dude that we don't know much about.  At some point he gains a real form and interacts with peeps, but mostly he just lingers in corners and looks all ghosty.  The movie kind of goes from there, and because that's not thrilling or interesting enough eventually it goes into some sort of possession and a standard convoluted, cluttered ending that I'm not really sure made sense.  But you know, that was kind of expected.

It's obviously not that high budget, and looking on imdb I see it was actually filmed in 1978.  It feels more like the 70's so that makes sense, plus the girls don't look like it's been over 10 years since they were in Bond.  The movie is mostly forgettable, keeps you interested enough, but doesn't fit the midnight movie, cult movie, drinking movie criteria.  In fact, it's almost good enough to just watch sober, except the end is a bit too much, and the movie can get pretty slow.  I think at 98 minutes, easily 10-15 of that could've been trimmed.

Overall, it's good enough.  2.5 stars.