Cinema Suicide

It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a movie and you see the name Alan Smithee in the credits. Alan is not a real person. I mean, maybe there’s somebody out there with the unfortunate name of Alan Smithee but when seen in the context of film or television, it implies that the person [...]

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A direct-to-video prequel to a prequel/spinoff of a sequel (The Scorpion King and The Mummy Returns, respectively), I don’t think anybody expected the Scorpion King 2 to be a blockbuster piece of entertainment. That’s a good thing, because it isn’t. Director Russell Mulcahy is responsible for the sci-fi classic Highlander but he’s also responsible for [...]

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Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe is a terrible sci-fi movie starring Jesse Ventura, former WWE star and governer of Minnesota. I’m surprised that clips of this movie weren’t run by Mr. Ventura’s opponents during their campaign; these devastating images would almost certainly have tipped the balance in someone else’s favor. Perhaps they decided that [...]

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Not to be confused with the Schwarzenegger movie of the same name- this Bollywood movie is something very different. What happens when you combine American Ninja, Where Eagles Dare, Romancing the Stone, set the whole thing to the score of Star Wars, and add some truly terrible song and dance routines? You get Commando.
Commando is [...]

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Bad acting and poor special effects aside, perhaps the one sure fire way to tell you’re watching some low-budget train-wreck of a movie is the amount of running you’re seeing on screen. Take, for instance, “100 Million BC,” one of the many ‘mockbusters’ churned out by The Asylum, those dedicated cinematic hacks committed to [...]

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I’m fascinated by the later part of the 60’s where hippies liberally threw around the the phrase ‘age of aquarius’ without really understanding what the hell they were talking about.  Drug culture seeped into the suburbs and it didn’t take long for average people to smoke a little pot, burn some sage to cover the [...]

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You know what?  We’re not always about blood and Satan up in here. True, I’ve reviewed some harrowing stuff in the past and it seems like blood and gore is always in stock, but it’s nice to get something like Johnny Tao that twists the format.  I almost don’t know what to do with myself [...]

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Generally speaking, most movies do not require a sequel. The Blair Witch Project, for example, could have lived happily ever after without its successor, the undeniably horrible and completely extraneous Book of Shadows. Don’t even get me started on An American Werewolf in Paris. Unless you’re bringing something entirely new to characters and/or scenario(s) crafted [...]

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Have you ever looked up from your delicious vegetarian lunch on the patio of a swank downtown eatery only to discover some hairy wack job with a digital camera filming your every move? If so, congratulations! You’re somebody special, and we should probably get together for dinner in the near future. Would you mind terribly [...]

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We live in strange times, my friends. It’s like Bizarro World, sometimes.  Big name directors dump tens of millions of duckets into producing movies that are supposed to resemble trashy exploitation flicks.  There’s a whole stable of these guys!   It is their mission in life to pay homage to the films that crafted them.  They [...]

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Just when I think I’ve seen the best the sexploitation world has to offer me and I decide to kiss it goodbye for good, along comes a film like Spermula.  Made in 1976 by French painter and filmmaker Charles Matton, the film is a surprisingly artsy erotic movie that is as surreal and eccentric as [...]

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For those of you that grew up as I did, that would be punk rock, you may remember the excitement of shopping for new records. Then was a time when you could trust a record label. If the album came out on Lookout Records or SST, it was a pretty safe bet that [...]

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Fernando Di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9 (aka Caliber 9, 1972) has been described as a cinematic achievement for Italian cinema and is widely regarded as one of the greatest poliziotteschi movies.  And its soundtrack is just as engaging and full of tension and surprise as the movie itself.
Argentinean composer Luis Bacalov composed the original score [...]

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Though it doesn’t come up often in day-to-day conversation, I do consider myself to be a pretty big fan of Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and his dodgy collection of filmed entertainment. He may not be the greatest actor to ever grace a cheap downtown double feature, mind you, but he’s got enough genuine, uncut screen [...]

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If only Disney didn’t take itself so fucking seriously.  Fans of cult film are probably aware, in some capacity, that in the late 70’s right up until the mid-80’s, Disney kicked out a series of movies both live-action and animated that they would probably prefer the world forget about.  I’m talking about flicks like Condorman, [...]

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If someone were to come up with some kind of camp measuring stick, it’s a fair call that The Rocky Horror Picture Show would probably top the list but there’s certainly nothing wrong with coming in second given the metric shit tons of campy flicks produced since the dawn of cinema and the present.  What [...]

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It has been a while since we have been graced with a full-bore trash opus from Lloyd Kaufman, and Poultrygeist proves beyond all doubt that the wait was well worth it. All of the classic Troma trademarks are present here: gratuitous frontal nudity, over the top gore, and politically incorrect humor that is guaranteed [...]

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Mandy, Mandy, Mandy, when are they going to release you theatrically?  I mean, here in the United States?  Seems you were a victim of last year’s ‘Great Grindhouse Flop of Ought Seven’.  The failure of Grindhouse put the fear of god in Hollywood money men everywhere for some reason and because of that, the brakes [...]

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During those dusty bygone days of the now-defunct Video Home System, purchasing films for your personal collection was a very costly venture. Unless the distributor had chosen to issue their product as “priced to sell,” the going rate for almost any movie on the market was simply outrageous. Spending close to one-hundred dollars on any [...]

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Before he was the Terminator (1984), before he fought the Predator (1987), and even before he was Pumping Iron (1977), Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in his first movie, the low budget crap fest Hercules in New York (aka Hercules Goes Bananas, Hercules: The Movie, 1970).  Calling it a crap fest so callously does do it some [...]

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