(literal title: The Monster of the Volcano) Honorable Mention Welcome to Mexico’s first Yeti movie. And it proves to be pretty much what you’d expect: brave hero, beautiful young girl, familiar horror elements we’ve seen in other non-Mexican films, and, of course, a big, silly-looking monster. A group of engineers are trying to construct a […]
Read more "El monstruo de los volcanes (1963)"(aka, The Lost Coast Tapes, Bigfoot) I’m beginning to understand why so many people grumble about found footage films. There are a lot of them out there. And they tend to have certain, shall we say, family resemblances. I still haven’t watched that many of them — at least not compared to the vast hordes […]
Read more "Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)"It always saddens me just a bit when I discover something only a few people have even heard of, let alone seen but which deserves a bigger audience. I’ll admit that does happen to me quite a bit because I have put a bit of effort into finding little seen movies, but it seems particularly […]
Read more "Ginga tansa 2100-nen: Bôdâ puranetto [Galaxy Investigation 2100: Border Planet] (1986)"There’s a basic conclusion I’ve reached since watching first the Polonia Brothers’ Reel Monsters and then another of their recent offerings which also features the legendary Bigfoot, House Squatch: I watched these two films in the wrong order. Reel Monsters is one of the best films Mark Polonia has made in a long time, an […]
Read more "House Squatch (2022)"Now how in the world did I end up watching all these Bigfoot movies? I mean, seriously. I just watched back to back a pair of grade-z Bigfoot movies from the Polonia Brothers (yeah, yeah, I know it’s just Mark now. And his son, Anthony), and now I watched one of those films which somehow […]
Read more "Harry and the Hendersons (1987)"It must be something about Bigfoot. Here’s one of the best movies I’ve seen from The Polonia Brothers — the legendary Grade Z filmmakers who’ve made an incredible number of memorably bad but surprisingly addictive DIY shot on video films for well over thirty years. It’s almost as good as Among Us (2004), which I consider […]
Read more "Reel Monsters (2022)"Now most of Dean R. Koontz’s fans will tell you that the movies based on his books are all terrible. I haven’t read his work, beyond a graphic novel adaptation or two, so I’m not in a position to comment on how well they capture his work, but I found both Sole Survivor and Phantoms reasonably […]
Read more "Watchers (1988)"I’m not sure what happened. Chris Wallas, the special effects master who was responsible for designing Joe Dante’s Gremlins, was acclaimed in the Eighties for his incredible creature effects. But by the mid-Nineties, he’d fallen out of favor and virtually vanished. I suppose, with the rise of cheap digital effects, movie makers just didn’t feel […]
Read more "Journey to the Forbidden Valley (2017)"(Literal title: Bend it! Spoon) This is an absolutely incredible film. You need to see it. Unfortunately, none of you are likely to be happy with a bare statement like that, so we’ll have to go into a bit more detail. One of my favorite Japanese comedies is Summer Time Machine Blues, a beautifully minimal […]
Read more "Magare! Supûn [Go Find a Psychic!] (2009)"(aka, Alien Hunter) Honorable Mention I’m not sure I would call Welcome to Willits a horror comedy. Yeah, I know a lot of people are calling it that. There are funny moments, and there’s a fundamental absurdity to the whole concept of this film (although it takes those absurdities seriously). But I still wouldn’t call […]
Read more "Welcome to Willits (2016)"
rivets on the poster 