Hands of Steel - 1986

Well, not only am I keeping up with the whole 2 movies off the boxset in one day thing, but I also rewatched a movie previosuly reviewed on this blog, in another Mill Creek boxset! Here is my previous review of Hands of Steel.

I re-read my review, which I have to say was in a lot more detail than I remember writing it. I thought this was one where I completely didn't pay attention, perhaps being out of my mind of weed and beer at the time. I guess I had short attention from being tired, but anyways, I'm just going to touch on a few things I didn't mention in the original review.

Number one, everyone in this movie is likable. That was something I picked up on this time. Daniel Greene, Janet Agren, John Saxon, Geroge Eastman, they're all just doing fantastic work and they play good characters. Pac Querak is a thinly written character to be sure, inspired by the likes of The Terminator obviously, but in that role many actors would fail. Daniel Greene plays him with a brutality which is really suited to the film and makes you take it more seriously.

There's bad stuff too. The middle of this whole movie just lags and slows down. There was a lot of debate in my head about if I change the rating from 3.5 stars to 4. I feel in a lot of ways like this is a 4 star film. However, the whole middle section with endless nothing happening, very drawn out and mostly pointless arm wrestling, and stuff like that does keep the score at a 3.5. I wish this had been higher budget, and these had been real action scenes instead of fucking arm wrestling. I feel like that is 100% because they didn't have enough money for anything better.

Also unforgivable is that the movie has one reveal waiting and obscured. The reveal that Daniel Greene is a cyborg could have been a huge, fun part of the film. Instead we see him win the arm wrestling, cut to his robotic hand open and being worked on. What a stupid, stupid waste of a cool idea. I'm almost talking myself into a 3 star rating, but I did thoroughly enjoy this nonetheless. I'll give it a 3.5, and I'll even say it's worth watching twice- five years apart.

The Thirsty Dead - 1974

Laura Gemser stars in.... oh wait. You're telling me that isn't Laura Gemser?

I can't see how pics will look anymore but anyways, the actress in this I really thought was Gemser.

This is back on the boxset, and since I'm not going to rewatch The Werewold of Washington or They Saved Hitler's Brain, I skip those to and dive right into this super low budget, Philippean made "thriller". Cirio H. Santiago and Roger Corman could do justice to the Philippeans, this movie not so much.

In the beginning we have three white women that are indistinguishable and Laura Gemser hanging out doing whatever when some weird Jawa looking guys kidnap them. They put the girls on a boat and take them to a underground dungeon where an evil cult is sacrificing girls because that's what evil cults do. There is a sympathetic guy played by John Considine who helps them out, and slowly, eventually, an escape plan is forged.

Whoooo this movie was a chore. The dialogue and audio is pure shit first of all, and the movie moves about as slow as shit too. This movie needed, in order to succeed, SOMETHING it brought to the table. Movies bring horror, violence, effects, nudity, strong characters, predicaments, all these things and more make a movie fun. THis movie had zero of that. Instead it settles for skimpy clothed women standing around and mumbling to each other.

The best part of the entire movie was pretending that the guys in huge hoods are Jawas. They appear in the first 5 minutes and then never again. Half a star for fake Laura Gemser (who barely exists in the movie at all).

eXistenZ - 1999

I just finished rewatching this Cronenberg film for about the third time, and dang if I don't feel right now like I want to rewatch a bunch of his older work.  It's just so damn weird!

I've seen eXistenZ possibly the most of any of his movies. Seems like a strange one to pick, especially since in my mind I like Videodrome and Naked Lunch more, and I love Crash and Dead Ringers.Yet, I do like eXistenZ and I think it's as good as a lot of his work, and perhaps less known.

Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh lead up an all star cast in this insane and for sure slightly confusing entry. In the beginning, Jude Law is at a demonstration of Jennifer's new video game eXistenZ when a man in the audience gets up and tries to assassinate her. He shoots her in the shoulder and Jude takes her away, and soon the two of them are embarking on a strange journey in both the real world and in the game world, and of course the lines between the two begin to blur.

My first thought watching this was, damn, I miss these effects. Real and extremely strange, props and devices and decorations are always present in Cronenberg films. There's the famous bone gun which I've remembered for years, and there's the video game consoles themselves, which are part insect and part genitals. Every time these characters jack into the game, they fondle this weird small pink thing that is decorated with things that look like orifices or nipples. The sexual connotation is high as the main characters also have sexually significant "ports" installed into their backs that they finger or tongue sometimes.

This movie was super ahead of it's time. It predicts a world in which people are overly consumed with games to the point where they believe more in the game than their real life. Once these people play the games, they just want to stay there, and it's fucking fucked up just like our current world is. This predicted the ugly turn games would take, and in this movie there's a strong theme of being against the technology of the game.

Second to that, the movie was obviously outdone by The Matrix, but this sort of plot was surely huge at the time. The whole fake reality thing might seem contrived right now, but this was made at the same time as Matrix, and should not be looked at as a copycat.

Not Cronenberg's best, but for sure a 4 star film.

Dungeon of Harrow - 1964

This fuzzed out fuckery of a film really fucked me, dude. I barely made it.

5 minutes in I was checking the time. I was wondering what was happening.

in the beginning, the Marquis de Sade is living on an island somewhere and a couple arrive, and soon enough Sade is fucking with 'em.

Nothing really happens, it's dull, and when something does happen, it doesn't matter. yawn. no stars

Double Exposure -1982

I've been doing two movies off this boxset every time I put in a disc...so far. If I kept that up I'd finish the set in just 25 days!

I put this movie on, and something about the acting or the style early on I knew I was in for a treat. Main actor Michael Callan is not someone I recognize at all, and is not leading man type, but he's great as a sorta weird enigmatic photographer. The style of the film is apparent immediately as well, great cinematography and music and editing.

The plot unfolds slowly, we follow the main character, photographer Adrian. He's a bit of an oddball, charismatic but strange and offbeat, and he takes pics and takes women to bed without nary a thought about it for the first like 30something minutes until he has a dream where he murders a woman. He goes to his therapist and talks it over, and we don't really know the reality of it until later when we see him killing people and he DOESN'T wake up, meaning it's real?

The film is quite ambiguous for a while even then as he goes on to date a new girl, and he has a weird relationship with his brother, and so on. We see him once begin to cheat on his girlfriend, and while he does so, flashbacks show us her death at his hands. He's looking pretty guilty and the law is hot on his heels.

The movie goes on, and it's really unique and fun in a shitload of ways. The casting is great and has a few known faces to legitimize it. It feels retro and very 70s a lot of the time, walking a thin tightrope of self aware and self deprecating at times.

I knew this one would have a cult following, and it does. It's extremely big online and even got a reissue on dvd recently by Vinegar Syndrome.

A thoroughly entertaining romp, it's a Bonafide 4 star film.

The Corpse Grinders - 1971

Ted V Mikels is an unheard of lower budget director most don't know anything about. I know of him from MST3K favorite The Girl in Gold Boots... Talk about an underrated episode.

In the Corpse Grinders (which I discovered is only two steps away from Larry Buchanan on IMDb) we have a no-name cast in a very low budget, minimal exploitation flick. This is a return to the really, really low budget and slow, slow ass filmmaking I haven't seen in a little while. And, despite being 75 minutes long, this movie takes forever to get anywhere.

This was in my amazon queue and it reminded me of when I used to watch stuff like this a lot. Returning to this after a year of hardly any exploitation, and also a year of really offbeat wtf 70s movies exclusively including the Swinging 70's boxset, I am left to wonder exactly what is wrong with me that at one point this was what I watched almost exclusively. This stuff is just plain bad, in summary.

There's a cat food company somewhere that is putting human flesh into their cat food, they're paying people 2 cents a pound for human bodies and they are continually running short because apparently this cat food is very popular. This naturally leads to people being killed to fill the increasing demand for cat food. It's a shoddy plot, but it's a shoddy movie. This happen and mild thrills are had as you basically just wait for these guys to get caught somehow.

I'll give it about 1.5 stars I guess.

Cujo - 1983

I have always had a interest in the Stephen King movies, probably stemming from reading his books as a young kid. To be honest, I don't remember at what age I read any of his books, and I don't remember which of his books I read. I remember I lost interest in his books before I was 14, because we moved out of the house I remember at that age and I didn;t read any of his books ever again after that. I never read Cujo.

Cujo stars Dee Wallace and Christopher Stone amongst others, and in that way this always felt similar to The Howling, the original Halloween horror movie of mine which...I should really rent tonight and rewatch before I offically go off the booze for a little while. Dee Wallace is having a affair with another man and is raising her young son with her husband. The kid is played by Danny Pintauro and turns in an annoying character but extremely well written and acted, thought I.

In the beginning of the film, Cujo is a huge Saint Bernard that chases a rabbit into a hole and gets bitten on the nose by a bat that lives inside the hole. Rabies being the culprit to the events that follow, we have about 45 minutes of character building and the cheating by Dee Wallace I spoke of earlier. She would later get married to Christopher Stone and become Dee Wallace Stone, and their chemistry is undeniable. She takes their car to the shop around minute 45 or whatever, and it promptly dies there. Meanwhile, Cujo has had the rabies sit in, and he's gone fully off the deep end.

The dog in this is fucking incredible. This movie was the one that got me into animal attack films, I realized midway through it. I really have to think it was this. The dog is insane, and it looks vicious as shit. It's covered progressively with more and more blood, slime, and drool as the film goes on, and looks like a goddamn monster.

Why isn't this film more well known?! This is my Jaws. honestly, I've always talked about this, I think Jaws is massively over-rated, and I'd take Cujo over Jaws any day. The Dog in this is a character, he is smart and vicious, intense and unpredictable. He looks fucking awesome, and is fully believable as not only a acting dog, but as a legit deadly threat. I think director Lewis Teague should've gone on to great things, and he did create some known stuff, but it's too bad this is probably his best work. The animal work in this alone deserves note, and the acting and cinematography help it along as well.

This is one of my childhood horror movies, I am biased, this is a five star film.

The Twilight Zone - 1959-1964

I'm legit trying to remember if I had seen this show before middle school. It seems sort of unlikely, but the truth of the matter is that, as suggested on this blog before, I was raised without a cable TV connection and we only had our VHS collection and what we saw at friends houses as "our TV time".

I checked the IMDb just now to see if there was trivia about this show being aired, or being pitched, or anything. I wonder if there is a documentary or something about it, because I'd have to imagine it pissed people off, scared people, broke records, the like. There is SO much here. Just so much, whether it's the horror elements, or the more extreme underlying themes. I can't see how this show didn't garrner controversy.

Rod Serling introduces each episode of this well known series, a series which for me introduced me to many actors and was a launching place for really well known writers, directors, actors, and other screen icons. The range is of course all over the place. I had never seen the entire show before now, when I sat down and watched all fucking 5 seasons, but I had seen many of these episodes before. I was spurred on to buy the series because I wanted to see them in order, nazi that I am, and because I had never seen any of the season 4 episodes which changed the show from 30 minutes to an hour. The plots are always something alien, something new, something different from what was being shown on TV at the time, and connected by a theme that they're all otherworldly. Otherworldly because, as said by Rod, this is the Twilight Zone.

A great many of these episodes have stuck with me throughout the years. I've found myself being able to randomly recall such episodes that I saw first such as The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street or Time Enough at Last. What I didn't know when I started watching the whole show was just how many episodes involve time travel, time travel which is usually around 20-30 years spans. That plot came up again and again, as did the whole war thing, having the war come out differently or having something remaining from the war. World War II being only 10 or 20 years in the distance cemented this, and it's not a bad thing or anything. Just unknown to me.

Now that I've seen every episode, including the hour ones, and they were all in order, I wonder a lot about the show as said in my first paragraph. I also wonder if I'll ever watch the whole show again, like I have with The X-Files or Star Trek. I'm confident I might play an episode for someone here and there, but I don't know if some of these I'll ever need to watch again. The show is great, it's tremendous and obvious, but it is a long, long show and it takes a long time to get into it. Sometimes, though, late in the cabin, watching 3-4 episodes in a row, felt really awesome and I'll miss those nights.

There is no rating other than a 5 to give this, it was so far ahead of it's time and so influential in obvious and extreme ways.

Glass Jungle - 1988

I bought this one randomly on VHS from a local store. It looked fucking stupid, I need no explanation besides that if you've ever read this blog. Dog.

Joe Canalito was either a boxer or a football star, I don't remember, but he wanted to switch to acting like so many others, and had a brief stint in Hollywood where he was cast in this dumbass movie. In this one, he's a LA cabbie driving people around and getting mixed up into the plans of baddies and goodies alike.

He is a entirely charmless character, thinly written and badly acted. We start with the fact it always sounds like he is reading directly off a page, emoting nothing, and it goes from there. This is a great riff material movie. I am frankly shocked Rifftrax hasn't done this movie yet. This is right in their wheelhouse.

He gets involved in some crime, I don't remember the details, and he gets entangled with the girl, and we have a flashback about how his last girl died, and there's other irrelevant stuff as well along the way. There's also plenty of scenes where he drives around, doing cab fares or not, and they even had their own 3-4 minute Glass Jungle song that plays at one point! That was hilarious.

I liked this in a so-bad-it's-good type of way, and was excited to watch it with my friend while we drank, but I was actually surprised that he didn't enjoy it. It's not even 80 minutes when the credits roll, so I thought it was perfect, but I guess I mean to say you'll either like or hate it. He described it as insanely slow....which it really, really is.

I will give it 3 stars still though.

The Evil Dead - 1981

It's Halloween time again. And I was browsing through Netflix with my girl and saw that this was available and shit yo. I can't think of a better way to celebrate Halloween early.

Bruce Campbell stars in the Sam Raimi directed early 80s horror film about a bunch of people going out to a cabin in the woods. Back then, it wasn't quite as over used but even this was aware of that as a trope. And this is aware of a lot of those things because it's also one of the first best horror comedies. I forgot how fucking great this movie is.

The effects start early and they start often, with members of the friend circle becoming Undead. There's the infamous tree rape scene which leads to the first girl turning into a creature and getting locked in the basement and then there is slowly by slowly girls turning into the zombies. I do say girls because it is all the women who turn into monsters first, as if making a statement about chicks and stuff in general. It's a subversive film with an agenda for sure but it's also really really well done.

Bruce Campbell is great in it and the action Keeps us interested. There's a shit ton of jump-scares and there's a lot of wondering what's going to happen next. The extremity of the violence and the blood is laughable and that's where the comedy comes in. And there's also some great camera work and truly great effects at different points. It's no wonder that this guy went on to do some great horror.

I remember this movie being barely legible as a film and it being Evil Dead II that was the great film. But while we were watching this I was struck with how good it is... and I know that Evil 2 is generally accepted as better, but this still gets 5 stars in my book.

The Naked Jungle 1955

Charlton Heston and some lady star in this slow, slow a movie about ants, but really it's about Charlton Heston and the other girl not getting along.

in the beginning we see that Charlton Heston is some guy living in the Amazon who sends for a mail-order wife. When she arrives the woman wants nothing more than to love him, but apparently she's married to the biggest assholes of all time and this guy just wants her to shut the fuck up.

I'm serious though he's a total ass the whole movie and no explanation is ever given. He's downright abusive and yet she wants nothing but to be his wife and it's very demeaning towards women. Not to sound super woke or anything but this is a type of film that I'm surprised that was ever made because of how unnecessarily offensive it is.

a long time goes by without nothing happening until the last 30 minutes random ants appear in Charlton has to fight them. The effects in their are pretty okay but overall the really slow movie that is really really bad. Despite the fact that I got it used with a sticker that says a great film stuck to the front of the VHS,