Our first feature was the 2003 Stuart Gordon film, King of the Ants. There were two films with the same name made that year. Here's a page from Yahoo Movies that mixes the two together. I don't know that we saw the better one. Stuart Gordon is probably best known in the horror genre for Re-Animator, and it's a pretty fun film. One of his best. I have rewatched it several times. Jeffrey Combs' Herbert West is really the reason the film is so re-watchable. King of the Ants doesn't fit into that catagory for me. I don't plan on getting a copy. Sperhauk is already thinking of selling his. And it's not that it was bad, it's just not that great that I would need to watch it more. Gordon's Space Truckers was more fun, and it has Debbie Mazar. This movie has Kari Wuhrer getting naked, and George Wendt getting his neck torn open. Those are some of the highlights. Our hero is a early 20 something looking for a calling. He falls in with low level bad men in the construction business. Always a hotbed of dishonesty. He makes all the wrong decisions and winds up being beaten by his boss and his cronies, in an attempt to brain damage him with out killing him. It's a long story at a 103 minutes, and there are some gruesome bits and some weird but cool brain damage sequences. He survives his beatings and escapes, recovers and returns to unleash vengence on his tormentors and rain fire down upon them. Everyone meets a gruesome death, ironically from the guy they created. And our hero heads off on his new career as an exterminator.
Our second feature, Curse of the Werewolf, was a 1961 Hammer drama with just a touch of werewolf. It drags the story over twenty odd years, from before Oliver Reed is born to the moment of his death. It seems a life time, even in those short 91 minutes. There is so much talking, both on and off the screen, that's always a bad sign. Mike slept for over half of it. Lucky Mike. A lot of people seem to like this film but I just found it slow moving and not very interesting. Oh, for my deck that plays stuff at 1.5 speed, I would only have sat through a 60 minute movie and it would seem faster paced. The werewolf hardly appears at all. You finally see the transformed Reed in full costume about the 80 minute mark, and it's not a pretty site. He looks like he belongs in Michael Jackson's Thriller. It's a good enuf looking picture, but the nice sets can't make the boring story any more interesting. Another one to give a miss on buying.
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