Friday, December 12, 2014

Novemberish

November

  1. Manborg 2011 - a deliberately bad film (zero budget, lo-def, lots of blue screen and retroesque stop-motion) that has its moments but wasn't bad enough to be good - or was too good to be good - or I didn't get enough of the references to understand just how good it was at being bad... or something. It was short. And I almost laughed once but shan't be running out to look up any more of the makers' work.
  2. Vixen - Russ Meyer. There were breasts.
  3. The Legend of Zorro - Friday Night Choice of Number Two Daughter - which was a lot of fun.
  4. War of the Robots - utterly dreadful piece of Italian SF watched with Number One Daughter. Much giggling gave way to snores as we both fell asleep.
  5. Daredevil - as bad as I had been lead to believe. Worse that Catwoman? Hmmmmm...
  6. Minator (2006) - low budget reworking of the Theseus myth that just about gets away with it - by derivative, low budget Sci-fi channel Movie standards - stand it next to a proper movie and it would look pretty shoddy. Minator was a little more ambitious in the atmosphere department than most modern monster by numbers films and did have some serious eye candy moments. The costume department in particular had fun trying to recreate the lavish decadence of Eiko Ishioka on a budget that stretched to about three pieces of vinyl leatherette per extra. Plotwise it was cobblers in that the Minator (and the whole of the palace above the labyrinth) is destroyed when our hero sets alight a plume from a natural gas vent. Gas which, in addition to being perfectly breathable for most of the time has the curious effect of turning innocent virgin Irish women into lipstick lesbians. Another Rutger Hauer movie off the list.
  7. Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft (2013) - Hoooo boy! A knockbuster feeding frenzy! Of the four! (at least) films reworking (or at least using the names of) the Grimm Brothers' story made in 2013 this HAS to be the worst. I haven't seen any of the others: Hansel and Gretel, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Hansel & Gretel Get Baked but I can state this as a fact. This is the worst. An amazingly pants film which featured an endless reuse of establishing shots of places that appear to have nothing to do with the story. (At the start they are used so ineptly that our heroes appear to be expelled from the new school they are then sent to - which is clever.) By the end, after watching the same half dozen shots of somewhere endlessly reused, I got to recognising the extras. The star extra was the girl in the pink trousers and knapsack who can be seen aimlessly wandering around in shot after shot after shot. Even those scenes which are supposedly taking place days after her initial sighting she's got the same clothes on and is diligently striding about getting nowhere. Nameless girl in pink pants, I salute you; you stole the movie. (Not that I suspect it takes much to steal a movie from Fivel and Booboo Stewart. Eric Roberts didn't even try. I suspect he was too busy laughing at the script and where the director was placing the camera to keep a straight face for most of the time.)
  8. Endgame - Bronx lotta finale (1983) - "A telepathic mutant recruits a post-World War III TV game-show warrior to lead her band of mutants to safety." Italian Post Apoc crap that starts off as a variation on the Tenth Victim - segues neatly into another Escape from New York clone before becoming another Mad Max-alike and ending up in the same quarry that all other Italian Mad Max-alike movies of the 80s end up. Yawn.
  9. How to Train Your Dragon 2 - okay story but seriously dead good in the eye candy department.
  10. Itty Bitty Tittie Comittee (2007) - Girl meets girl; girl loses girl; girl blows up the Washington Monument. Fluffy bit of rad les fem which would have been a lot funnier and daring if it had been made 20 years earlier (I knew women like this back then) but still passable.
Abandoned in November:
Dragon's Rage (2012) Elfs and Dwarfs and goblins and other bollocks running around after magic Bloodsteel maggufin stuff - all handily explained in a pre-credit montage which dropped us into the middle of the story. (Dragon's Rage, it instantly becomes obvious, is a chopped down version of some much longer TV thing) Within moments of the credits finishing actors are standing around in pointy-ear makeup and floor length robes, barely able to summon up the energy to deliver clichéd 'Fantasy' arsedribble about 'alignments' and 'crucibles' and 'destiny' while the director whooshes his steadicam around them. I lasted about 16 minutes. In that time I managed to spot what looked like a nice white modern house in the distance on a lakeshore and a spelling mistake in the chapter headings: 'Proficy'!?

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