I’m trying to figure out what signals so clearly that this is a super cheap film. I mean, I’ve seen worse monster makeup in far more expensive films. Nor does the film quality look that much worse than most Eighties horror films. Perhaps it is the lack of music most of the time and the […]
Read more "Bloodsuckers from Outer Space (1984)"Not long ago, I reviewed Specimens (1982), one of the best of the films made by Irish amateur filmmaker, Roy Spence, who works out of the cinema he owns in Comer, County Down. He’s made over forty films over his fifty year career, and you can find all of them in The Irish Film Archive. You […]
Read more "The Attack of the Saucer People (1981)"After watching the outrageous and deliberately old school Rat Scratch Fever (2011), I’ll confess that I found myself wondering whether any of its director, Jeff Leroy’s other films had achieved that same blissful level of absurdity. I’d seen his later film, Giantess Attack (2017), which had much of the same goofy, old school, retro feel, as […]
Read more "Creepies (2004)"I loved this one. Wow, I didn’t expect. that. Now there is something here that I need to point out right from the start. After all, I know a lot of you out there don’t get it. They look at a film like this and immediately start complaining about the effects. All I can say […]
Read more "Rat Scratch Fever (2011)"A group of thieves carry out a daring jewel robbery, and go to meet their fence in a deserted factory. Unfortunately, they don’t realize that the gangster they’re dealing with plans to rob them. Or that the United States Army has been conducting some rather nasty off-the-books experiments in that old factory. Which, unfortunately, have […]
Read more "Junk: Shiryô-gari [Junk] (2000)"Some short films are like an entire feature film packed into a small package. And that is perhaps the best description of Specimens: it may only be fifteen minutes long, but it feels like some lost Sci Fi feature film you know you’ve seen but can’t quite remember. Mind you, you probably haven’t ever heard […]
Read more "Specimens (1982)"Honorable Mention How in the world do you even begin to talk about a film like Battle Heater? There are some many things that it is — or almost is — that it’s hard to know where to start. Hama (Akira Enomoto) is an electrician who gathers all sorts of electronic junk, repairs it and […]
Read more "Batoru hîtâ [Battle Heater] (1989)"I’ve been looking for this one for a while. Back in 2011, Jeff Waltrowski released an interesting microbudgeted faux-Thirties film called It Came from Yesterday which riffed on the old adventure serials. Jeff himself starred as Professor Jack Cranston, genius inventor and the head of the crime-fighting Electric Club, which was a sort of cross […]
Read more "Project: Valkyrie (2002)"Look, let’s be honest. This is one of the so-called “Zen Movies” Donald G. Jackson and his star and co-writer (if that phrase has any real meaning here) Scott Shaw made together. They are called Zen movies because they had no script. Yep, no script. Nada. Nothing. They started with some general idea what the […]
Read more "Guns of El Chupacabra (1997)"It should be a big deal. After all, Warriors of Future was Hong Kong’s first attempt to go head-to-head with Hollywood, making its first big budget blockbuster movie. And while it doesn’t have quite as big a budget as the latest Marvel movie, it does have a lot of the things we expect from Hollywood: […]
Read more "Ming yat zin gei [Warriors of Future] (2022)"
rivets on the poster 