Horror, 89 Minutes, 2013
[This is the eleventeenth selection in my irregular, “My Wife and Kids are Visiting Relatives and I’m Home Watching Movies” film festival.]
Tag: Monsters
Movie Review: A Six-pack of Asylum Schlock
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| Sharknado Horror, 83 Minutes, 2013 |
Jack the Giant Killer Adventure, 87 Minutes, 2013 |
Atlantic Rim Sci-Fi, 83 Minutes, 2013 |
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| Age of Dinosaurs Sci-Fi, 88 Minutes, 2013 |
AE: Apocalypse Earth Sci-Fi, 87 Minutes, 2013 |
2-Headed Shark Attack Horror, 83 Minutes, 2012 |
I’ve written about low budget schlock before, almost all of them produced by The Asylum, which has produced over 300 feature-length direct-to-video movies since 1997. They focus almost exclusively on producing “Mockbusters”: terrible films with budgets under a million dollars loosely based on current blockbusters and released days before the inspiring film hits theaters. Their films generally take less than four months from initial idea to final product. Recently they’ve become the go-to team to produce the SyFy Channel’s steady stream of increasingly ridiculous monster/disaster films. They’ve also slid into a weird niche producing ridiculous faith-based family films to cash in on the evangelical dollar.
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Movie Review: Grabbers
Comedy/Horror, 94 Minutes, 2012
We had it in our heads, for some reason, that this was going to be another terrible SyFy Channel-style CGI-monster crapfest. We crowded around the TV, claws unsheathed, ready to have a blast tearing this terrible piece of shit to tiny shreds. Sadly we ended up disappointed.
You see, it ended up being good. Even very good.
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Movie Review: Piranhaconda
Horror?, 87 Minutes, 2012
The SyFy channel continues its unspoken mission to destroy the art of filmmaking. They’ve seen the future and it’s a giant machine that takes two things, smooshes them together and makes them worse than they ever could be alone.
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Movie Review: Age of the Hobbit
“Age of the Hobbit” (aka “Clash of the Empires”) on IMDB
Fantasy, 87 Minutes, 2012
[After I released this review I learned that this was also released under the title “Lord of the Elves” and this is how you’ll find it – if you really insist on doing so – on Amazon.com Instant Video.]
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Movie Review: Cabin in the Woods
Horror, 95 Minutes, 2011
Clever movies are more fun. It’s not that movies have to be clever to be fun or that clever movies are always fun – but take any regular dumb movie and make it clever and you have more fun. For example take the plot where a bunch of friends drive up to a ridiculously remote cabin that they’ve never been before and then get picked off in ones and twos by zombies, cannibals, demons, ghosts, rednecks, rabid weasels or what-have-you. That’s not a clever plot. That’s a clichéd, hackneyed, dime-a-dozen plot. “Cabin in the Woods” takes that tired plot and makes it clever.
“Cabin in the Woods” is insanely fun.
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Movie Review: Infestation
Horror, 91 Minutes, 2009
I really adore classically staged monster movies. The kind where everyday people have to deal with giant things – worms, bugs, crocodiles, lemurs, etc. Whatever they are, they’re big and they’re nasty. Classics like “Tremors” [IMDB] or “Eight-legged Freaks” [IMDB] are just plain fun. The scares tend to be more of the shock than gore variety (although there’s a little of that as well) and generally things are more family friendly.
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Movie Review: Roadkill
Horror, 88 Minutes, 2011
Christ-on-a-cracker this was bad.
Six friends get together to tour Ireland. You can drive across the country in a few hours and anything worth seeing is surrounded by inns, pubs and absolutely no parking; so of course these geniuses rent the biggest god-damn RV they can find. We kick-off with the requisite “watch the gang having fun!” musical montage. We spend just enough time there to split off the two characters with back-stories from the generic timid girl, hot girl, dumbass guy and black guy. Then, introductions out-of-the-way, we beeline straight for the dirtiest, creepiest gypsy gas station on the whole damn island – which happens to be at the absolute ass-end of nowhere.
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RiffTrax Live: Birdemic
As a belated birthday treat for my son my lovely bride and I took him and a van load of his dumbass friends to see the latest RiffTrax Live event from the fine folks at RiffTrax (presented by Fathom Events). The movie this time out was the modern crapterpiece “Birdemic” [my less than charitable review].
Birdemic was made for this. Not only did Mike, Bill and Kevin make suffering through the movie enjoyable they quite literally turned the experience into the funniest experience I’ve had with a movie… well, since the last “RiffTrax Live”.
The experience is not unlike inviting a bunch of friends over to watch bad movies. The difference here is that the screen is 40′ tall, you have 300 friends and you don’t know any of their names. It’s some of the purest, simplest fun you’ll ever have in a theater, hands down.
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Movie Review: Drive-in Horrorshow
Horror, 107 Minutes, 2009
Low budget horror movies can take several directions. Some attempt a tone of such complete, sincere seriousness that they can do nothing but fail when delivered by terrible actors. Others veer off to the other extreme where they attempt to downplay their shortcomings with parody or comedy. These tend to fail even more completely because parody and comedy aren’t remotely the shortcuts these folks think they are. In fact they’re almost impossible to pull off correctly.
