Quentin Tarantino has been talking about Inglorious Basterds for years. He was so immersed in penning the perfect script for the epic WWII movie, that he actually wrote and directed Kill Bill as a break. But after all that hinting and discussing, the film is finally hitting screens, with Brad Pitt heading up the cast as the main badass in a group of guerrilla style Nazi assassins, trolling German occupied France with some heavy artillery and a baseball bat. So does Tarantino’s opus live up to a decade or more of hype? Allmovie’s Cammila Albertson, Jason Buchanan, Perry Seibert and Jeremy Wheeler weigh in with their takes on it.

Read the rest of this entry »

July, 1989. GoreZone No. 8. Cover story: “Balun insults everyone — Is splatter dead?”

Hardly a triumphant celebration of the sticky stuff for a magazine touting the tag-line “All the splatter that matters” — who could have ever guessed that the kings of gore were about to take over Hollywood? That was one year after Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II burst up from the fruit cellar to scare us all silly, and two years after then-obscure New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s deliciously vile Bad Taste was speculated to become the next Rocky Horror by GoreZone’ sister publication Fangoria Magazine.

Flash forward to 2009, when Raimi is responsible for what is arguably the most successful comic book film franchise ever and Jackson is sitting pretty with an Oscar for Best director.

Read the rest of this entry »

Please stop paying attention to Megan Fox.

Really.

It’s starting to get out of hand.

Yes, we realize you want to have sex with her…

It’s never going to happen.
Get over it.

Now that we’ve fulfilled our bloggy obligation to have a post dedicated to everyone’s cinematic obsession du jour, back to our regular programming.

Yours Truly,
A Heterosexual Male Whose Idea of Beauty Doesn’t Necessarily Jive with the One Imposed on Us by Jollywood

PS: No, we’re not posting a pic.
PSS: …or hyperlinking her name.

Internet dwelling movie and TV nerds have long lauded the genius of TVTropes.org, a massive, usually hilarious database of nearly every recurring cliche found in fiction. The site has all the old school Greek, Shakespearean, and Biblical archetypes, but where TV Tropes really shines is in its multitude of nuanced, previously nameless ideas that you’ve seen a million variations on, most of which have hysterically appropriate names like Shut Up, Hannibal and Beard of Sorrow.

It’s truly a rabbit hole of delightful time-suck, especially when you’re exhaustively searching for one terribly specific trope. Case in point, as I set to work on my review for the Dakota Fanning sci-fi action thriller Push, my first order of business was to summarize the totally effing exhausted cliche that the whole story’s built around.

Read the rest of this entry »

As several of our editors have noted from time to time, Hollywood spent the past decade upping the ante on remakes to an absurd degree – from remakes of old television series, to remakes of old sci-fi vehicles, to remakes of remakes. God, how I’m sick of this creative bankruptcy. I’ve started asking myself point blank: “Does it ever end? And is anything sacred?” Apparently not where dollars are concerned. The elephantine re-do of The Day the Earth Stood Still was about the last straw for me; Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal were outstanding enough under Robert Wise’s brilliant direction, without my needing to see Keanu Reeves interact with a massive CG-animated robot (though that pairing is not too far off, come to think about it) in something vaguely posing as a re-creation. (Pity the Middle American 8-year-old boy who mistakes it for original material). Perhaps in desperation and certainly out of resentment, I went back to the basics last week – back into the annals of sci-fi to find an extinct species – the non-FX heavy, cerebral sci’fier. In this case: Val Guest’s brilliant, overlooked The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which I found for free on DVD at my library. It’s intelligent, it’s provocative, it’s scary as hell, it’s aimed primarily at adults, and this is one film I sure hope Hollywood is never myopic enough to remake, because special effects would ruin the impact here, moreso than in any other sci-fi film I can think of.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a veteran of the laserdisc era.

I was thinking about that as I pondered the first decade (or perhaps even 11 years) of the DVD, which 2008 marked, on December 24 of the year.

To a lot of people under the age of 25 — and actually, to just plain a LOT of people — the “laserdisc format” won’t mean too much, because at the peak of its popularity, around 1996 or so, there were never more than about a million laserdisc players in use in the United States.

Those with longer memories, or who spent time in Japan (where there were several million players in use, even in the 1980’s), however, will remember the format: LP-size platters, usually silver on both sides (distinctly non-compact discs was the best way to summarize them), massively heavy, and usually in fairly flimsy LP-size jackets, all containing visual programming (movies, TV shows, still-frames, but in the end mostly movies). They were never overly popular, partly owing to the cost ($25 to $100 list, in a $15 CD marketplace), their cumbersome size, some production problems, and the fact that one couldn’t record in the format. As a clue to their lack of visibility, until the 1990’s laserdiscs were hardly ever mentioned in mainstream video advertising, except as an after-thought.

Read the rest of this entry »

Call me crazy, but what in the holy hell is up with Don Johnson?! Over the past year, he’s turned up in not one but three major foreign language outings: the Norwegian gag-fest Long Flat Balls 2, Italian actor-turned-helmer Jerry Cala’s farce Torno a Vivere Da Solo, and (my personal favorite) the Italian thriller Bastardi. And yes, as the trailers below indicate, it’s the same Don Johnson. Hmm, let’s see… cavorting with a troop of goofy Scandinavian actors on a naval set, then appearing sans explanation with a hideous dimestore mustache in an Italian domestic laugher and an even more bizarre hat and suit in a Mediterranean thriller? Let’s put it this way: post-Nash Bridges life may or may not be exciting for the ex-Mr. Melanie Griffith, but it sure looks weird from where I’m sitting. Kind of reminds me of when Larry Hagman (in the days of his early Dallas stardom) decided to hearken off to Sweden and star in Vilgot Sjoman’s comedy Jag rodnar (1981) … or when Chevy Chase signed on to play Paul Parmesan in that B-grade Italian comedy Our Italian Husband (2004).

Read the rest of this entry »

With the passage of time, one season’s flop can become another season’s classic, and that’s certainly been the case with 1958’s Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’ visually inventive and absorbing exercise in film noir. Universal Pictures didn’t know what to make of the movie when it was completed, and they released it on the second half of a double bill with no press screenings despite a star-studded cast that included Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich. Fifty years later, Touch of Evil is a cult favorite widely regarded as one of Welles’ finest American features, and Universal has given the film a glossy DVD re-release in honor of the picture’s fiftieth birthday. However proud Universal may be of Touch of Evil in 2008, the new DVD edition offers a telling portrait of the troubles Wells had bringing his story to the screen as he saw fit in 1958.

Read the rest of this entry »