When Mad Max: Fury Road came out and blew everyone's minds, a lot of critics remarked that director George Miller is a grandpa and that they expected him to make patient and reflective movies now that he's in the twilight of his years. Certainly not the best and craziest action film of recent years that single-handedly revolutionized the genre at a time when such a thing was deemed to be a long shot.

Well, perhaps to appease those expectations, here comes Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, the existentially introspective movie that critics might have originally expected from an intellectually and emotionally complex grandpa of his ilk.

As amazing and groundbreaking as Everything Everywhere All Once is, its success will not do any favors for the audience's expectations here. In order to piggyback on that lightning in a bottle's success, Three Thousand Years of Longing's dis...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Apparently at some point in our house I had shown the trailer of the 2019 Addams Family movie, which is either a remake of the live action movies or an extension of the original live action show (I don't know which) to my son, we'd watched it and I thought it was OK, nothing special, but as his cinematic tastes broaden and he develops bonds with some of these folks on screen, a new fresh helping doesn't hurt, so Addams Family 2 graced our doorstep.

Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon, Laura Brousseau and Kevin Pavlovic direct the film that Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Ben Queen and Susanna Fogel developed a screenplay for. Gomez (Oscar Isaac, A Most Violent Year guy) and Morticia (Charlize Theron, Gringo) see their kids Wednesday (Chloe Moretz, Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Brian Hannant, who co-wrote the screenplay with John Baxter, 1987's The Time Guardian had one of the biggest budgets of any movie made in Australia at the time. It was, by the standards of the country's film industry, a project of fairly massive scope and ambition and it was meant to put the country on the map, proving that it could put out the kind of crowd-pleasing blockbusters that were, and still are, coming out of Hollywood… but it didn't really turn out that way.

The movie begins in the year 4039 in the advent of the Neutron War. A rag tag group of survivors use their abilities to travel the city they call home through time to, hopefully, find solace and, ideally, not get slaughtered by the sinister cyborgs known as The Jen-Diki, whose missions is to basically commit genocide against the human race for reasons that are never really proper...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Alas, this new Child's Play shoots itself in the foot early on with a narrative decision that annoyed me for the remainder of the film. Gone are the vengeful spirit of serial killer Charles Lee Ray and the delightful quips of Brad Dourif, and this remake from Lars Klevberg instead takes Chucky into the present, seemingly modern era. Meet Buddi, a doll that can connect to and operate other devices from its Kaslan creator. What gives the film's anti-hero Buddi its murderous rage? An assembly line worker at Kaslan is fired, so he manipulates a doll, deleting its intended code and allowing for a new learned personality. That doll is packed ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:Nicholas McCarthy's The Prodigy certainly does not reinvent the "bad seed" genre, but it is a relatively effective thriller perfect for renting. A young couple's son is born the same night a notorious serial killer is gunned down by police, and the man's soul inhabits a part of the young boy's brain. The film poses some engaging questions on what, exactly, this young child knows and how much of him, if any, is truly the innocent boy birthed to loving parents. Nicely shot and released under the reborn Orion Pictures label, The Prodigy offers a chilly narrative from writer Jeff Buhler, a strong central performance by Taylor Schilling ("Orange is the New Black") and enough slow-burn chills to warrant a viewing.

You do not learn much about serial killer Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux), other than that he cuts his female victims' hands off and that he exhi...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

On one hand, it is nice to see Bruce Willis actually appearing to care about a role in 2018. On the other, Eli Roth's Death Wish remake feels unnecessary, as have several of the horror director's recent projects. It is not as if this story needed updating; there's already a very competent version of this professional-turned-vigilante tale in Michael Winner's 1974 original Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. That said, Death Wish 2018 is not a terrible film. It is entertaining, decently acted and very bloody. The film's best trick is the bait-and-switch its marketing team did when they offered up a fairly standard revenge tale to audiences unfamiliar with the gore and violence of Roth's seedier projects. I can now add MoviePass to the things this movie was made for, a list that al...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The 1981 adventure flick Race for the Yankee Zephyr (also known as Treasure of the Yankee Zephyr) first caught my eye when it was excerpted in the "Ozploitation" documentary Not Quite Hollywood. It wasn't available on US DVD in those late-'00s dark ages, so I filed it away in my mind as a flick to keep an eye out for. Now, at long last, MGM has released a DVD-R of the movie, with a decent-looking transfer, as part of their manufactured-on-demand (MOD) "Limited Edition Collection." Was it worth the wait? Eh...

Yankee Zephyr was originally supposed to re-team writer Everett De Roche and director Richard Franklin, who toget...Read the entire review

In my city, there's a monthly event at a local theater called, "B-Movie Bingo" wherein moviegoers come to watch a VHS of a crappy 80s or 90s film on a screen that is capable of handling 70mm and compete to complete their bingo card of genre cliches (i.e. villain in white suit, three mustaches on screen at once, severed limb, high fault, etc.). A training video showing numerous examples of these cliches is shown prior to every film and for a few years now a clip of a deranged looking man/monster getting hit in the head with a basketball with such force his head explodes entirely has captivated me. What does this have to do with "The Immortalizer", a straight-to-VHS horror film offering of the late 1980s? Well, at a glance, the villain on the cover resembled the man/monster from that video clip and my curiosity to find context behind the clip was piqued.

"The Immortalizer" is a baffling piece...Read the entire review

When the DVD format was at its peak and there were several more stores to buy them at, MGM would routinely issue drive-in type B-movies from the 60s and 70s (from long-gone minor studios that they had gotten the rights to the catalog of), many of which had either never been released on home video previously or were long out of print, and usually give them incredibly clean new transfers and sell the discs at bargain prices to boot. Many of these came out under their "Midnight Movies" line. Sadly retail support now isn't what it used to be and MGM has resorted to putting out their lesser titles in burned, "manufactured on demand" discs available primarily through mail-order, but "The Peace Killers" (shown as two words in the movie, but just one on the packaging) from 1971 shows ...Read the entire review

There was absolutely no accounting for taste in the late 80s & early 90s. From men with mustaches to women with short hair, the beauty trends that went along with the turning of that decade are inexplicable. And of course, as they always do, the movies of that era echoed the culture, producing an ascetic that's hard to explain, but impossible to deny; just watch an episode of Magnum, P.I. and you'll know what I mean. But not only did those trends live long & prosper, they were copied & carried over to other time periods, persisting against all logical sense. Looking back now, 80s/90s movies have become a genre of their...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
What more do you need than ninjas and baboons?

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: How Did This Get Made?, cult films
Likes: '80s action films
Dislikes: MOD releases
Hates: Dumb comedies

The Movie
Considering how much of my youth was spent in video stores, when I come across a previously-unseen ‘80s film, it's a definite surprise. That goes double for a film that features ninjas, a big-breasted woman (who seems to not be in the movie) and a baboon on the cover, because there's no way a younger me would have missed such a visual. Unmasking the Idol is amazing in that "so bad, it's good" way, like a subpar James Bond film made by a crew with limited English comprehension....Read the entire review

Unjustly forgotten, Number One (1969) has been a virtually lost Charlton Heston movie, a football drama and character study, a pet project of the iconic actor, made near the height of his fame. Though released decades ago on VHS, there was never a laserdisc version and, until now, no DVD.

Heston, of course, was one of the biggest stars of the 1950s and ‘60s, first playing larger than life biblical and historical figures in The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), etc., then later headlining cynical science fiction and disaster films such as Planet of the Apes (1968), Soylent Green (1973), Earthquake, and Airport 1975 (both 1974). The obscurity of Number One is all the more puzzling considering that it was directed by Tom Gries, who also helmed Heston's excellent, equally under...Read the entire review

After Robert Englund played Freddy Krueger for what he thought would be the last time in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, he traveled to Russia to appear in this little-seen movie produced by Menahem Golan post-Cannon Films. Englund plays Anthony, an American dance choreographer who moves to the Russian city of St. Petersburg to help run Madame Gordento's Academy of Dance. It was said that he and "Madame," a former dancer herself now confined to a wheelchair, were once lovers and possibly still are. Through flashbacks we see that he had worked with dancer Svetlana whom he was also obsessed with, and could have been a huge star had she not been killed in an accident while riding on Anthony's motorcycle after a performance. That accident haunts him to this day.

The Academy has now started admitting dancers from outside Russia for the first time, attracting a number of girls from all ov...Read the entire review

The Movie:

One of about a zillion post-apocalyptic action/sci-fi movies made in the eighties, 1986's Land Of Doom, directed by Peter Maris (the man who gave us the Jan Michael Vincent classic Hangfire), tells the story of a survivor named Harmony (Deborah Rennard). She lives in a world that has become a wasteland… we see this in the opening scene where crabs crawl over the hand of a corpse laying on a riverbed. The bomb has been dropped and what's left of mankind has resorted to barbarism. Gangs of hairy guys clad in leather roam the cities raping and pillaging as they see fit. These gangs are called Raiders and they're bad news.

After getting into a scrap or two, Harmony winds up befriending a soldier of fortune type named Anderson (Gerry Dowhen). They decide to work together to stop the Raiders but those guys, they've got vehicles and weapons to spare whereas our he...Read the entire review

The Falling:
The Falling, (AKA Alien Predator) available now on MGM's Limited Edition Collection on-demand DVD imprint, should go a long way towards answering those 'what was that movie' questions late night cable TV horror fans may have lingering. That is, if this Spanish oddity ever saw time on TV. It sure seems like that type of movie. "What type of movie, you blowhard?" my readers ask. It's the type of movie that in its way, asks what would the movie Alien have been like, were it comprised of three teenagers driving an RV around a deserted Spanish town.

In 1979, the mini-space-station Skylab crashed to Earth, unable to wait for us to get our acts together by sending a space shuttle up to repair it. They don't make 'em like they used to, or something. But hey, we tried. Unfortunately, the craft brought something back with it. Something that infected the Spanish town...Read the entire review