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Showing posts with label 1986. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1986. Show all posts

8/15/09

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I'm watching this film, because I vaguely remember the cheesy video cover from when I was a kid, but never got to see the film. Now it's playing on MGM-HD, with the film's descripition reading - A detective and doctor tie rapes to bug-eyed aliens who are posing as humans in order to multiply. Sounds too hilarious to pass up.

Opening few minutes
- A prostitute leaves a taxi cab in a bad part of town, she's followed by a mysterious man, who turns out to be an old German guy, walking his little dog. They talk for a moment, before the guy falls to the ground clutching his chest. Suddenly his hand transforms into something monstrous, the girl just stares, until he grabs her leg, rips her dress open, then carries her off screaming.

4 - 8 min. - The most unconvincing movie doctor and the most unconvincing movie detective I've probably ever seen. Quite the impressive feat, considering they're in the same scene together.

8 min. - The detective just told the mangled and barely conscious prostitute: "You're not dead, you're alive, and if you're alive, then you can remember what happened." - The doctor stands there knowingly, like that's good advice.

11 - The doctor goes over the case-loads of 5 other women this has happened to. Apparently they were all virgins. Now I'm confused... the girl who I thought was a hooker, was in fact just the sluttiest looking virgin in history.

12 min - Super cheesy montage of a girl modeling a bikini.

13 min. - Cocaine and nude aerobics! - The camera lingers on the model's nude body while ear-numbing synth music plays... when did this turn into a porno?

15 min. - The photographer walks in on the girl lying nude in the studio, suddenly his chest bursts open and he starts to change into something else. The make-up effects are actually pretty well done. I'm guessing this girl is supposed to be a virgin as well, but what kind of virgin snorts coke and lounges about nude in public places?

24 - As a homeless woman gets attacked by a rubber-faced alien, I'm looking up filmmaker Tim Kincaid on IMDb. He's directed 44 films in his career, not a single one of them have I even heard of besides this one. A lot of them sound suspiciously like porn, with titles like Joe Gage Sex Files Vol. 3 and Gale Force: Mens Room II. Although Robot Holocaust sounds awfully promising. (Emphasis on the awful.)

29 - I always get undressed in my kitchen.

32 - "Enough to know that I want you to bear my children." - Is what the guy tells the girl who's naked in her kitchen, after she finds him watching her and asks him what he's seen. Of course he's one of the aliens... yeah, just stand there and scream honey, don't try to run, that would make too much sense.

38 - Don't any women in New York run when they see an alien?

40 - Oh god, the teenage orderly has a crush on the virgin-hooker... and now he's discovered that all the women attacked have returned to normal, at least on the outside that is.

45 - Virgin-hooker is awake and just stabbed the orderly in the gut with a knife, and is now roaming the hospital corridors nude.

52 - The alien stopped a human rapist, so maybe he's not so bad after-all... ok, never mind.

55 - There isn't a girl in this film who hasn't taken her shirt off within the first 30 seconds of appearing on screen. (That's not a complaint.)

60 min - The detective and doctor have followed the nude model into the depths of New York subways system, where she meets up with the rest of the girls, who are all skinny dipping in some sort of pulsating alien hot-tub.

62 - Now some random hospital worker, who's also followed along, is explaining the whole alien plot and why they need virgins to reproduce.

65 - This!
67 - The detective and doctor stand by slack-jawed as the hospital assistant slowly mutates into one of the aliens. They don't bother to react until it finally goes on the attack.

70 - Now the nude girls writhe about in the alien hot tub, while the doc and dick painfully work out a plan to stop the aliens dastardly plans.

72 - Naked lady stew!

74 - Wow... this movie was exceptionally bad, while also being eminently watchable, with its terrible acting, some of the worst ever committed to film, painful dialog, and more believable human interaction found in porno films. But the crazy plot, gory effects, and boobs being exposed every 3 to 4 minutes, keep the film entertaining. If you're into bad movies, this is a gem.

10/17/08

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If you've read this site before, you know I have a special place in my heart for 80's movies. Especially for the ones that I grew up with, those that I saw 50 times on HBO or burned out our family's first VCR watching over and over. Wildcats was one of those films. It had just about everything a prepubescent boy would want to see, crude sex jokes, farting, high school football, and a brief glimpse of Goldie Hawn naked. Like most films from this time in my childhood, there came a point where I stopped watching them. Discovering filmmakers like Scorsese or Kubrick, I wanted more sophisticated films. These were forgotten or regulated to guilty pleasures of the past.

Running across Wildcats in the discount bin, I had brief memories of Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes rapping about football, a kid bashing in lockers with his head, a fat guy blocking a big kick, and fancy stolen hubcaps on a VW bus. I didn't have much expectations for a well made comedy, I only wanted to walk down memory lane. Once I had it home, it didn't take long for me to pop it in. Instead of watching a copy of the classic On the Waterfront, I'd been holding on to for too long, I went with the high school jock movie I'd seen 20+ times in my past. I'll always go for the easy watch first.

The amazing thing was that Wildcats turned out to be nearly as good as I remembered. The childish sex jokes worked on a new level. The dramatic elements, about a woman wanting to coach high school football and having to do so in a bad part of town, seemed genuine. The verbal abuse, treated comically, she takes from her players, ex-husband and former boss ring true. Everything about the film is a cliché, but they're classic movie elements that work and are well executed. Goldie Hawn is at the top of her game here, she's bubbly cute, with perfect comedic timing. Her team is full of actors that went on to better roles; Woody Harrelson is the smart-ass QB, Wesley Snipes is the cocksure wide-receiver, and Mykelti Williamson is the ultimate talent, who'd rather spend his time being a criminal. The film also features great character actors, like M. Emmet Walsh as Goldie's attorney who only talks in football terms, James Keach as her manipulative ex-husband, Bruce McGill plays her sexist former boss and coach of her crosstown rivals, and Nipsey Russell cracked me up as the principle of her new school with his every utterance of the word "Riiiight."

It's most definitely an 80's movie, with awful fashions and hair styles, an incredibly cheesy music montage with the boys becoming a team, and a very young LL Cool J rapping about football. Except for the 80's setting, I think the film works better than most of today's comedies. It doesn't rely on easy pop-culture jokes and you actually become invested in the characters and their underdog story. The film has its flaws, but they're quickly forgotten as the movie moves effortlessly ahead with its solid screenplay and strong acting. The film is well directed by Michael Rithchie, who directed one of the greatest sports comedies ever The Bad News Bears, the scenes flow well and the football scenes actually make sense. If you watch a lot of sports movies as a sport fan, you'll notice a lot of over-the-top stuff that doesn't really happen on the field or even worse is when the games just aren't played right. If you're a fan of 80's and/or sports movies you could do much worse than Goldie Hawn and her Wildcats. - Grade: B (Seen on 10/10/08)


1/28/08

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I'd never even heard of this film, when I ran across it on one of the movie channels. But it's an 80's horror flick, starring the always creepy Klaus Kinski. That's all I needed to give it a watch. Unfortunately, I think that's all the filmmakers had going for them when they decided to make it. They said, "Hey, we got Klaus Kinski, as a voyeur, psychopathic Nazi, the movie will make itself!" That's basically the whole film right there.


Kinski plays Dr. Karl Gunther, he owns a small apartment building and performs ritualistic tortures in the attic, other than that, he's your basic peeping tom. He will only rent rooms to pretty young women, because at night he crawls through the building's ventilation system spying on girls getting undressed. Sure that sounds like some good-bad cinema, but wow, do they manage to make it boring. Nothing seems to happen. It gets a little more interesting when he decides to bring his rats along as they squeak and try to crawl out of the vents, creeping out the girls.


So a new girl Lori moves in, and Karl begins to spy on her. She seems a little more astute than the rest of the tenants and starts to notice that Karl isn't only a little eccentric, he also may be insane. She stumbles across his evil plot, which includes building nasty torture devices and keeping a girl with her tongue cut out locked in the attic, his only real friend. They bond, while watching old films of Adolf Hitler speeches. Lori discovers all this and in the only worthwhile scene in the film, is chased through the building's Crawlspace by a very pissed off Kinski.


It's a short film with a somewhat good idea, but little actually going for it. Klaus Kinski, who was used to great effect in many Werner Herzog films, is pretty much wasted here, he puts on some lipstick and makes a couple of goofy faces, but that's about it; and sadly he remains the only real reason to watch the film. The director David Schmoeller, made a couple of horror flops in the 80's, this and the gem of his career Puppet Master are the only two I've had the pleasure of seeing. If you're a Kinski fan, it might be worth a watch, otherwise forget it.

1/27/08

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(It seems there is new attention for this movie, based on the filmmaker's lawsuit against J.K. Rowling. The main character is named Harry Potter Jr., there's a fantasy element to the film; but those are the only similarities.)

I hadn't seen this film since I was a kid, so long ago that it actually scared me. I didn't have a lot of hope for it to hold up, but I'm always willing to take a stroll down memory lane. Immediately I could understand why this scared me as a child. Within minutes of starting, the film has an evil ugly troll kidnap a little girl and take over her body, begin living with her family, including her brother, a little boy that I could easily identify with.


The Potter family has just moved to San Fransisco, into an eclectic old apartment building, where everyone knows everyone else, and everyone has interesting quirks. Harry Jr.; yes, that makes him Harry Potter, a good decade before the books, which is also highly distracting whenever they call him by his full name, which seems to be a lot; almost immediately notices that something is wrong with his sister. After watching a cheesy sci-fi film, he believes she's a pod-person, but soon discovers the truth, thanks to a friendly witch living upstairs from them.


Meanwhile, the Troll, hiding in plain site as a little girl, is quickly taking over the apartment building, thanks to his nasty ring that has poison needle on it. He's turning all the residents into various mythical creatures, because he's lonely. All their apartments start overgrowing with trees and plants, to better accommodate their transformed residents. Of course the Potter parents are completely oblivious to what's going on, and it's left up to Harry to save the day, with a little help from his witch friend and her weird mushroom boyfriend.


The film has some cool stop-motion effects, most notably when some giant vines start to take over the entire building, as a crowd of San Fransisco-ians watch. There's one creepy scene, at least from a child's perspective, towards the end of the film, where Harry is laying in bed, with his troll/sister lying in the bed next to him, and she keeps transforming back and forth between them. A pretty terrifying idea for any kid with a sibling sleeping in their room.


While I wouldn't call the film well made, it's too goofy for that; it is undeniably entertaining. In a so-bad-it's-good type of way. A kid can look past the bad acting and silly plot-line and enjoy it as a creepy fantasy story. Us grown-ups can enjoy it for the scene where all the puppet Trolls start singing in unison or a very young, half naked Julia Louis-Dreyfus starts frolicking around as some sort of fairy princess high on pixie dust. Troll is some good brainless fantasy/horror fan, if you enjoy it with a double order of cheese.

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Don't confuse this with Troll 2, which has absolutely nothing to do with this film, beyond the name; and has gone on to gain some infamy as the "best worst movie". There's even documentary in the works about it all.