Posts

Sinners (2025)

Image
I've never seen  Creed  or any of its sequels so I mainly know Ryan Coogler from  Black Panther   and its follow-up.  Marvel films, with their cookie-cutter plots, bland film style and awkwardly forced politics are never a way to judge a director.  In fact, if anything, all the major franchises have been pretty much career killers for directors.  They either have the film taken out of their hands and something completely different presented - for which they get the blame - or the bland, no-risk process washes out whatever creativity they ever had. Many directors have actors they like to work with and, in this case, it's Michael B. Jordan.  He played Killmonger in the first Black Panther , becoming one of the few memorable villains of the franchise, and is himself a creative force in acting, music and activism.  It's good to have someone like Jordan to lean on when trying to break away from what I am sure feels like an assembly line style of f...

Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (1990)

Image
At one point it looked like Troma Studios, the film company founded in 1974 by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, was going to play with the big boys.  The Toxic Avenger was a major cult hit and they followed it up with the Class of Nuke 'Em High franchise, which did well on video.  Unfortunately, Kaufman's attempts to get on the big screen and have major distribution failed, most spectacularly with Troma's War , which was released in severely butchered form in the studios to appease the MPAA and promptly flopped. Financially strapped and hoping to get another hit in theaters Kaufman and Herz made two sequels to The Toxic Avenger and attempted to start another mock superhero franchise with Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.   It barely received any release and remained one of the company's more obscure offerings until 1996 when Tromeo and Juliet lifted car chase footage from the film.  Since then it has become a minor cult film, but nowhere near the success that Troma was hoping ...

The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989)

Image
Before The Toxic Avenger Troma was doing okay.  While it did produce some of its own films - many of them raunchy comedies - they made most of their money distributing other people's movies.  The Toxic Avenger changed all that.  Suddenly, Troma was a major independent studio and, while not rolling in cash, Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz suddenly had a lot more money than they ever thought they would.  The movie itself was violent, cheap and featured a hyperactive acting style that would become a key element of the studio's features going forward.   While Kaufman and company released new movies on the regular, gaining a reputation for a certain style and aesthetic as they expanded the Tromaville universe, it made financial sense that at some point Toxie would have to return.  What Kaufman didn't expect was to suddenly have a four-hour epic on his hands that, at his wife's suggestion, he split into two parts.  The first, not coincidentally, was The...

It! (1967)

Image
Herbert J. Leder set out to do what any good producer and director should do, which is copy a winning formula and hope to make money off of it.  The winning formula in this case was Hammer's brand of horror films.  Hammer had not only cornered the market in England - although Amicus and Tygon had a bit of success riding their coattails - but had done so in the U.S. as well, despite heavy competition from American International.  The blend of blood and sex was just the thing for a generation that was starting to come into its own and a film industry that was leaving its old ways behind. It! also owes quite a bit to something much older that Hammer.  Paul Wegener was an early film director and makeup artist who had a hit in 1915 with his horror film Der Golem .  Now lost except for some scenes of the ending, it told of the modern-day rediscovery of a creature that had been created to protect the Jewish ghetto in Prague against a pogrom.  In Wegener's movie it...

Night of the Lepus (1972)

Image
The 1970s saw a revival of a '50s staple: giant animals attacking.  Unlike earlier, they decided they didn't need to build models or put guys in rubber suits.  There was a new way of doing things: take a real animal, dress it up a bit and film it walking around miniatures.  No muss and no fuss.  Well, except for the fuss that animal rights activists threw about the obvious mistreatment of the animals, including gluing things on to them and doing stuff to force them to perform. As far as I know that didn't happen in Night of the Lepus , as all the "blood" on the big, hulking, frightening creatures is ketchup.  There are a few scenes where I questioned what was happening to the bloodthirsty beasts they filmed, galumphing their way through the Sonoran Desert to reek havoc among our dusty backroads communities.  Even the posters show strange eyes looking out of the darkness, huge fangs and Janet Leigh fleeing what must the most terrifying creatures on the face ...

Rottentail (2018)

Image
Director Brian Skiba is from my neck of the woods or, more appropriately, desert.  I got to looking him up when his fictional town of Easter Falls was shown as being about 40 miles from Lake Pleasant and 125 miles from Payson.  Since I don't know exactly which direction from those towns it is,  I would put it somewhere in Yavapai County, north of Wickenburg, but not too far.  Probably up around an isolated youth counseling center that I used to deliver to when I worked with a pharmacy 25 years ago or so.   The reason I would be thinking all of this, and getting distracted enough to try and figure out where a town that doesn't even exist would be is that trying to figure out where the town is seemed more interesting than the movie.  As much as I love supporting anyone creative coming from Phoenix and the surrounding areas, Skiba is a filmmaker more along the lines of Jess Franco or Jean Rolin.  He just hasn't done anything truly brilliant yet....

Hearts in Atlantis (2001)

Image
Hearts in Atlantis made me concerned when it came out in 2001.  The book is a collection of stories loosely revolving the Vietnam experience.  Three stories - the title story, "Blind Willy" and "Why We're in Vietnam" - deal with it directly.  Two others, "Low Men in Yellow Coats" and "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling", serve as the basis for the movie, and revolve around a young boy named Bobby and his recollection of a turning point in his childhood. While the majority of the stories in the book do not have supernatural elements and are some of the best examples of Stephen King's general fiction writing, the main story the movie was based on does.  Even more concerning for me when I heard about a movie adaptation was who the low men were.  In King's expanded Dark Tower universe they are called Can-Toi, and are the offspring of humans and a race of humanoid creatures with animal features called Taheen.  They pretty much serve as a...