Future Fear (1997)

Jeff Wincott sniffs rabbit turds in this movie. To make matters even worse, it’s the sort of movie where we aren’t sure whether the rabbit turds are even real!

The great rabbit turd conundrum is really the least obnoxiously obtuse thing about the whole affair though as the film barely takes time out from its strictly amateurishly disjointed presentation peppered with references to Alice in Wonderland, over the top moments like Wincott fighting his wife with a toilet plunger, Maria Ford scrunching her face into shrewish expressions while shrieking at Wincott, and the seemingly random insertion of scenes from an entirely different movie to ever get around to explaining just what in the hell was going on with the embryos Wincott was trying to save the world with while his wife (Ford) was trying to kill him and steal them for the evil general. Continue reading “Future Fear (1997)”

Black Thunder (1998)

Former piloting mentor turned traitorous bad guy Ratcher (Richard Norton) yells at Vince Connors (Michael Dudikoff) during their climatic dog fight “I’ll out fly you in a school bus!” provoking a chuckle at the thought of the Australian kickboxing movie icon flying around the sky in a big bright yellow bus doing loops and barrel rolls while the Dude looks on in stupefied disbelief.

None of that happened of course and the Dude ends up getting behind Ratcher and executing a move so that one of Ratcher’s own heat seeking missiles blows up him and his school bus fantasy, but it was surely the most memorable moment of a movie that was so generic, it was easily sort of remade as an equally generic Steven Seagal film, Flight of Fury. Continue reading “Black Thunder (1998)”

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

pitandthependulumposterVincent Price, Roger Corman, and Edgar Allan Poe rebound nicely in their second teaming after the deadly dull House Of Usher that came out the year before with a picture that finally delivers on the whole “haunted castle” gimmick. It isn’t really haunted of course, but you’ve got deception, betrayal, madness, secret passages, and most importantly of all, a working torture chamber down in the basement! Continue reading “The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)”

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

I’ve read a good portion of H.P. Lovecraft’s writing in my time and for the most part, I’ve found it enjoyable, in spite of the often times purple prose. Once upon a time I even read The Dunwich Horror story that this movie is based on. I don’t recall all the details of the story, but I’m confident that as I was reading it I never thought “this would make a great movie with Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee!” Continue reading “The Dunwich Horror (1970)”

The White Pony (1999)

White Pony DVD CoverUnlike a lot of Olivier Gruner films, The White Pony concludes with a climatic dressage competition that sees an evil teenaged girl sabotaging her cousin’s riding equipment, abusing her own horse and whacking her cousin with a riding crop. And also unlike a lot Gruner’s films, he stands around the whole movie with his thumb up his ass while his daughter treats his niece like so many road apples. Okay, to be fair, he does snicker a bit when his niece falls off her horse and lands in a horse pie, but he doesn’t get any credit for that because any of us would have done the same. Continue reading “The White Pony (1999)”

A Very Unlucky Leprechaun (1998)

A Very Unlucky Leprechaun DVD CoverMolly’s life is full of sad backstory that you normally only find in routine country music songs. Her mom died (a mother’s survival rate in so-called “kid friendly” leprechaun movies like this always approaches zero) and then she is forced to move to an old cursed relative’s home in Ireland because her loser dad Howard can’t seem to sell his newest “how to” book and went and lost their house. Of course, it turns out that there is a significant amount of back taxes owed on the house in Ireland which Howard also can’t afford. Maybe for his next “how to” book Howard should write about the wisdom of staying in America and just renting an apartment. Continue reading “A Very Unlucky Leprechaun (1998)”

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Among the Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s various works, The Masque Of The Red Death stands out as one of the best, featuring superior production values (they flew over to England for a tax break and apparently ended up re-using the sets from Beckett), an appropriately vile performance by Vincent Price as Prince Prospero, and a story that was more than the standard old dark house with degenerate families story that seemed to permeate these productions like the stench of a corpse moldering in a secret chamber somewhere in the living room walls. It didn’t hurt this movie any either when this midget burned alive a guy in a gorilla suit. Continue reading “The Masque of the Red Death (1964)”