The Carpetbaggers (1964)

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This movie confirmed to me what I always suspected. Namely, that I have really bad taste. How else can I explain that despite the fact that this film was two hours and twenty minutes of silly soap opera trash, I had little problem sitting through all of it?

Jonas Cord, Jr. (George Peppard) has serious daddy issues. Dad has called Junior on the carpet for another one of Junior’s flings with the ladies. After attempting to castigate his son with a bunch of jive about real men having brains in their heads, not in their pants, Junior fires back about his dad being an impotent old man and that it was good that Junior does what he does so that his dad’s wife won’t think all the Cord men are losers!

Though I’m a big fan of such scenes, I was also a bit worried that this would be one of those movies where Junior would be having run ins with dad every half hour or so, thus slowing down Junior’s ruthless business ways and his callow treatment of the money-grubbing skanks he was sure to bed down and throw out like yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

But Harold Robbins didn’t proclaim himself the “world’s best writer” and sell three quarters of a billion books, by getting bogged down in stuffy father-son arguments. So, right after that the old man croaks right there in the office! Continue reading “The Carpetbaggers (1964)” →

Mars (1997)

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This movie came maddeningly close to being a can’t miss entry in the whole “kickboxer busts up corrupt outer space mining colony” genre of films.

Olivier Gruner plays an emotionless mining cop who somehow gets almost emotionally involved in investigating his brother’s death. More importantly, he sports a pretty bad haircut (but not nearly as bad as the one in Savage) and throws his badge down on the ground after he finishes getting all sorts of vengeance on pretty much the entire population of Mars.

The mining company is up on Mars to mine Silex which is some kind of something that’s a really great source of fuel for all us greedy Earthlings. Like all miracle discoveries in science fiction though, Silex turns out to be decidedly un-miraclous. Continue reading “Mars (1997)” →

Nightmare City (1980)

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A movie which somehow achieves the bizarre status of being ahead of its time and also a slavish copy of more popular contemporaries, Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City proves that the Italian exploitation filmmakers of yore were even better at their trade than anyone at the time even realized.

Coming in the wake of George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead and Lenzi’s fellow Italian legend Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Nightmare City doesn’t take any pains to hide the debt it owes those two films. Of course, it should be noted that Lenzi himself stated in an interview on the Black Demons DVD that Nightmare City was not a zombie movie at all, but was about contaminated people that ran amok. Continue reading “Nightmare City (1980)” →

Night of the Kickfighters (1988)

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How cool would it be if there was a kickboxing-champ-turned-action-hero that us mere mortals could emulate? What if there was a guy taking on impossible missions to save chicks and the world that wouldn’t be a threat to our fragile masculine egos? Wouldn’t such a fellow be in for a long and successful career with his regular Joe qualities?

No. Not really. In fact, the same things about such a guy that would cause him not to threaten us normal dudes would be exactly the same things that would make us laugh uncomfortably whenever this regular kickboxing guy foolishly attempted to strut his lame stuff.

Do you really think you want to see an out of shape, balding, middle-aged loser huff and puff his way through a series of fight scenes so badly staged that a professional wrestler in his first match would cringe at their amateurishness? Continue reading “Night of the Kickfighters (1988)” →

The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974)

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This one sure made me long for the pretentious navel-gazing of the insipid baby boomer parable Fritz the Cat. Two years after everyone was impressed by a horny, foul-mouth, drug-addled cartoon cat that was long on posing and short on everything else, the expected cash-in sequel was released and the results were pretty much what you would expect. Except nine times worse!

It’s a hodgepodge of stories where Fritz is apparently imagining his life in different scenarios. These scenes are partly designed to be shocking and partly designed to be topical. Thus you get scenes of Fritz hanging out with Hitler and also flying to Mars.

Fritz has apparently recovered nicely from the substantial injuries he suffered when that power plant blew up at the end of the first movie because he is now out of school and married to this fat broad who does nothing but criticize him for everything he does (drugs) and doesn’t do (work). Continue reading “The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974)” →

Fritz the Cat (1972)

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Fritz is a student at NYU, though like most of these pampered college kids he never actually goes to class. Of course, even if he did, he’d just have those left-wing professors feeding them that anti-American, anti-Christian crap these pinko infested campuses are bastions for. Instead of being brainwashed in class though, Fritz heads to the park with his guitar and a couple of buddies, but their band only really goes into action when some big-bootied gals wander by, showing us that they have what it takes to be rock stars!

Eventually, he discovers that the ladies flock to a crow (they represent the black folks in this movie) and try to impress him with all their white guilt and classes they’re taking in African studies. He blows them off, giving the enterprising Fritz his opening. He lets loose with a torrent of babble about how his soul hurts and he’s on a quest for meaning and all the other great intellectual challenges that have fueled hours of upper middle class faux-conversations for years. And of course it works! Continue reading “Fritz the Cat (1972)” →

Noctem (2003)

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Okay, I had absolutely no idea that I needed another Night Of The Living Dead movie, but you know, made in Germany, until I watched a bunch of characters boarding up a farmhouse and shouting in that hideously abrasive language while distinctly somber Teutonic tunes played in the background.

Noctem looks much better than its meager budget, but the meager bit of it that passes for originality isn’t very good and manages to slather the film in a slimy coat of self-important philosophical and religious musings that made me think these zombies weren’t really operating at full tilt since Amy and Kusey had time to debate the Biblical implications of their situation.

Kusey runs the local video store and in between the piles of previously viewed copies of Big Mamma’s House on sale for three Euros, he finds Amy in pool of her own blood, a victim not of the zombies, but of her own botched suicide attempt! Continue reading “Noctem (2003)” →