What was the last movie you've seen?

[fastbilly1]

Had a double feature recently:
Gymkata


And The Angry Red Planet


Gymkata is the perfect mix of Gymnastics and Martial Arts in that a real gold medal winning gymnist, Kurt Thomas, over throws the "not Russia at all" Parmistan government as some sort of secret agent. What I did not realize until recently is that it is actually based on a book: The Terrible Game by Dan Tyler Moore. The Terrible Game is pretty much medieval Hunger Games, written in the 60s. Terrible Game and Gymkata have so little in common, no wonder they dropped the book from the poster.

Angry Red Planet on the other hand had alot going for it. Written by Sidney Pink (huge writer of many spaghetti westerns) and Ib Melchior (wrote Deathrace 2000, Robinson Crusoe on Mars), solid cast of lesser knowns - starring "I dont look or sound like Bogart at all" Gerald Mohr. It is pretty standard 50s Scifi. Atomic Power is scary but it gets us to Mars which is full of crazy flora and fauna and creepy bat monsters. At the end Martians let the humans come back to earth and tell them "dont come back or we will blow up your planet." Symbolism!

But why did I watch such a schlock movie that is obviously not so good. Well half of the film was shot in something called Cinemagic. Where they shot in black and white, solarisated it (kinda making a positive), tinted it slighty off axis and red. This Cinemagic was supposed to give a quasi passive 3d effect. Instead it gave us something like a mix of George Méliès (Trip to the Moon) work and Ralph Bakshi's (Wizards) rotoscope magic. So that sounds really complicated. But it takes something that should look like this:

And turns it into this:



It gives me a headache pretty quickly.

[REPO Man]

I myself also had a double feature:




I figured since I recently rewatched SC1 I may as well watch the next two.

I'm not gonna revisit Return to Sleepaway Camp, but only because I don't own it yet. If I did I would. I've only seen RtSC once and it was WAY better than SC2 and SC3 combined.

That's not to say they're not without their charms. Despite not being made by the director of the first one (who later made RtSC and ignored the events of SC2-3 and SC: The Survivor), they're not bad but lack the polish and overall quality of the first one.

[Ack]

No Retreat, No Surrender

So much about this movie is gloriously painful. So, so much. First and foremost, the acting is awful. The script was written by a man who had never written one before, and he apparently spent long nights each night revising it. As a result, vital scenes are missing and likely had never been filmed. Dialog often makes no sense. Audio ques are off. And perhaps most importantly for the advertising campaign, the backstory of our "primary" antagonist gets only a mention once or twice in the film and isn't actually relevant at all to the plot. At its core, No Retreat, No Surrender is little more than a Karate Kid knock off that took way too much influence from Rocky IV...and then threw in Bruce Lee's ghost.

Are there any positives? Well actually, yeah. Many of the leads were martial artists first and actors second, so while they're terrible at delivering their lines, they're actually quite good at choreography. This movie marks Jean-Claude Van Damme's first major performance, and his fight against Ron Phonel's character in the lead up to the final showdown is highly watchable and brilliantly handled. Supposedly Van Damme had problems with his control while making the movie, a fact that would come back to bite him during a lawsuit some years later, but when he was on point, he was on point. Also, if you like 1980s training montages, this movie has one that seriously tries to last for a third of the run time. And it uses the greatest 1980s montage song that isn't Eye of the Tiger: Hold On to the Vision.

But it still makes some pretty unforgivable mistakes: an obvious white guy plays the breakdancing double of the black sidekick to the hero. The same shot is used showing the crowd in the final fight at least four times. Another shot from a different movie is in the final arena scene which shows a completely different set of exhibition judges in a completely different arena. The crowd size changes noticeably at the end. Add this to the problems with the script and such, and you've got a ridiculous mess of a movie. Oh, and I wasn't kidding about Bruce Lee's ghost; No Retreat, No Surrender is classic Brucesploitation, even going so far as to star Kim Tai-chung, one of the doubles used to make Robert Clouse's release of Game of Death and Game of Death II. The training montage I spoke of earlier contains all of the "Sensei Lee" scenes.

No Retreat, No Surrender is terrible, but it's also entertaining, usually for the wrong reasons.

[noiseredux]

If I did I would. I've only seen RtSC once and it was WAY better than SC2 and SC3 combined.

wow... I disagree hard. I love 2. 3 is alright. But Return is terrible.

[stickem]

Shit I seen no retreat no surrender when it first came out. I loved it, but I was only 12. I seen that and rad back to back. Rad still holds up to me. been a long ass time since I seen nrns though.

[Ack]

Rad still holds up to me.

Well, yeah. It has only the greatest dance scene involving a bicycle in film history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVJzi7Ta9w

[noiseredux]

^not a "dance" scene... a bicycle boogie scene.

[Ack]

^not a "dance" scene... a bicycle boogie scene.

Please. This is far better than anything John Travolta ever did. This is Breakin' quality right here.

[REPO Man]

Second time I've ever seen this.

I've also seen the original, though the similarities are few and far between.

But whereas the original was a trippy splatterpunk mindfuck, this is a gonzo, hallucinogenic trip down the proverbial rabbit hole.

When a reporter (Kip Pardue) with a trust fund and a taste for vintage style finds himself engrossed with performer Montag the Magnificent (played with a maniacal brilliance by Crispin Glover). His tricks, which start with a geek (horror superstar Jeffrey Combs) performing his gastrointestinal feats (mostly just biting the heads off of rats) and sufficiently grossing out one particular audience member (mostly a lovely female played by one of the Suicide Girls), who then seemingly gets horribly killed onstage, only for everything to just (magically?) go back to normal.

But when each of the unwilling volunteers ends up horribly murdered in a manner similar to the trick, questions begin to pile up in the decreasingly sane mind of our reporter protagonist.



An in-name-only sequel to Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2 (itself an in-name-only sequel to the European release of Dawn of the Dead), Zombi 3 is much more action-oriented. This is due to the fact that while shooting in The Philippines, Lucio Fulci fell ill and was replaced by Bruno Mattei, whose zombie films are typically more action-oriented in nature (from what I've heard). Of course, Fulci claimed that the producers kept changing the screenplay and he left on those grounds. While Fulci's footage supposedly amounts to 70 minutes, only about 50 minutes of the film's 85-minute runtime is comprised of Fulci's footage, the rest being the work of Bruno Mattei, who considers Zombi 3 to be Fulci's film and not his own.

The difference between Zombi 2 and Zombi 3 are obvious, but that's not to say one's better than the other. Well, that's not entirely true since Zombi 2 is a better horror film while Zombi 3 is a better action film.



Loosely based on the Herschell Gordon Lewis film "Two-Thousand Maniacs", "2001 Maniacs" is an awesome horror film, spearheaded by Robert Englund and Lin Shaye as Mayor Buckman and Granny Boone, respectively.

There was a sequel (though it was more of a reboot if anything) that replaced Englund with Bill Moseley.

I totally recommend it. The first one, I mean. If you like it then I'd recommend the sequel (which is vastly different in tone, with the humor more abundant and less dark).

[noiseredux]

The Wiazard Of Gore remake and 2001 Maniacs were both great.