Horror and Sci-Fi films old and new, weirdo trash, arthouse, forgotten gems, well loved classics, and I'm watching the original Dr Who from the beginning.
Originally conceived by Cannon Films as a sequel to the Chuck Norris kill-fest Invasion USA, Avenging Force re-teams the stars and director of American Ninja 1 and 2. The goofy comic feel of those films is toned down and partly replaced with a darker tone, but end the result is still ridiculous and entertaining.
Ex-secret service agent, Matt Hunter (Michael Dudikoff) comes to the aid of his army buddy and best friend Larry Richards (Steve James), an African-American politician who has become a target for a racist organisation known as the Pentangle. After Larry's family is attacked and Hunter's sister kidnapped, Matt vows to take on the Pentangle one man at a time.
The script is mostly dumb and nonsensical (after a Pentangle massacre at a Mardi Gras parade, the people in the next street carry on as if nothing has happened) and the sadism and racism of the bad guys, who think nothing of shooting women and children in cold blood while throwing the N word around makes this a cruel affair at times.
Although Dudikoff is the star, Steve James steals every scene he is in with his charisma, energy, and obvious martial arts skills.
The climax is a Most Dangerous Game style chase through atmospheric Southern Gothic swamps, replete with lashings of thunder and lightning. Unfortunately, this turns out to not be quite the end, with a 15-minute coda whose sole purpose is to promise a sequel that never happened. Still, overall this is big dumb fun entertainment, that doesn't pretend to be anything else.
There is a long and noble tradition in Turkish cinema of churning out knock-offs of Hollywood favourites with little care for subtlety, logic or copyright laws. 3 Dev Adam (which translates as 3 Giant Men) continues this, taking two beloved Marvel characters and a Mexican wrestling legend and crapping on their characters reputations from a great height.
The plot is in there somewhere. It's something to do with antiques or counterfeit US dollars. Spiderman is not your friendly neighbourhood web-slinger.
Instead he is a childish but a psychotic gangster, who gleefully buries a woman up to her neck in sand and then decapitates her with a speedboat propeller. Captain America, who has no shield but does have a girlfriend has come to Turkey with legendary Mexican wrestler Santo to sort Spidey out.
Who cares about the plot though. What you get is 90 minutes of war speed delirious nonsense, with a constant energy that means the film never gets dull. At one point, Spiderman tortures an enemy with a rodent oriented headset straight out of 1984, expect that instead of rats he uses a cute guinea pig. Oh, and Santo's favourite filing system for incriminating documents is to shove them down the front of his spandex trousers. He seems to do this a lot.
Things come to a head at the end where it turns out Spiderman can clone himself, or he has a lot of lookalikes lying around. I forget which. My brain hurts. It's a film where hairy men in stag do superhero costumes beat and grope each other into submission. Sometimes you don't need to over analyse things.
A slasher film crossbred with Dawn of the Dead and Short Circuit, Chopping Mall is cheap cheesy gory fun.
The Park Plaza Mall has just unveiled a hi-tech security system, consisting of three shiny new robots programmed to disable and apprehend thieves using lasers and grappling hooks. Meanwhile, a gang of teens are having an after-hours party in one of the mall shops where they work. As the evening heats up, a lightning storm hits the mall and damages the computer controlling the robots and the highly armed mechanised menaces now want to bump off anyone who shouldn't be in their mall - which is just about anyone who is there.
Of course, a film like this is going to have a brainless plot (to repeat, the mall plans to stop shoplifters with lasers that can split a person's head open) and paper-thin characters. But director Jim Wynorski also manages to strike the right balance, so the result is something not po-faced and serious, or too irritatingly knowing, just first-class trash viewing.
Wynorksi also chucks in some in-jokes for Corman buffs, from posters for his previous films to cameos from the likes of Dick Miller, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov.
Not Wes Craven's finest hour, Shockerfeels like any one of the lame rip-offs of and sequels to his bona fide classic A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi) is a TV repairman who uses his job to complement his favourite pastime of killing families. High school football star Jonathan Parker (Peter Berg) keeps dreaming about Pinker attacking his adoptive family. When this happens in real life, Parker helps get Pinker sent to the electric chair. Unfortunately, all this does is turn the killer into an electrically charged demon who can zap between bodies, possess the original owners and turn them evil. It hasn’t done much for Pinker’s mood either, as he now sets out to get revenge.
Pileggi's scenery chewing turn gives the film some energy (as does the funny cameo from Timothy Leary as a TV Preacher), and the extended fight scene through various TV channels showing everything from graphic war footage to Leave It to Beaver injects some much-needed life towards the end.
However, for most of its running time, Shocker is just a standard goofy, 80s slasher film with all the clichés, such as unsympathetic characters, a soundtrack that alternates between hard rock and grating synths, and some cringe inducing wisecracks from the killer.
