PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 839

VFW 2019 Screenplay by Max Braillier and Matthew McArdle, directed by Joe Begos.

Stephen Lang is the bartender at the VFW post, William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, David Patrick Kelly and George Wendt are his old Army pals. They come to the bar to drink and hang out. It's nothing special but it's a place for them. That all gets interrupted by the arrival of a young girl, she's stolen a big bag of drugs from a psychopath drug dealer. He sees her run off with the stash and sends his younger brother and a few henchmen to get her back.

The thugs rush the bar and David Patrick Kelly goes down with an axe in the shoulder, nearly all the thugs are killed including the psychopath's little brother. The psychopath sends an small horde of fucked up drug addicts to kill them. There's plenty of action, oodles of body parts hacked and sent flying. It's a battle to the end and hardly anyone comes out alive at the end.

I enjoyed it, a good solid action film with a great cast. It had a nice, dark sense of humor, good gore, and a great score. My only complaint is the action was in the fast jump cutting style and I'm not as big a fan of that. I'd still watch it again. Worth a look for the fans of that sort of thing.

Psycho Goreman 2020 I watched it a month or so ago and posted about it on FNM. It's still funny and Mimi is still an asshole.

Friday Night Movies 837

Pixels 2015 Story by Tim Herlihy, screenplay by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling, directed by Chris Columbus. I have a box of DVDs waiting to be watched for the first time. Tonight I stuck my had in the box of discs and pulled out one at random. I couldn't find a good sized copy of the cover to the DVD via Google so grabbed the one on Amazon. The IMDb has posters of movies but they've changed their web page to only allow screen captures of the images posted to their page. Annoying, it now takes longer to grab an image. I noticed that the DVD was only $3.74 on Amazon and the Blu-ray a tenner. You can pick up a used copy for $1.96, costs more than double for shipping.

The movie opens in the 80s and the early arcade games were all the range among the kids. A trio of kids are competing in an arcade championship, they grow up to be the adults in the film Adam Sandler is a home-theater installer and Kevin James is the President of the United States. The arcade action was recorded and put in a capsule that was launched into space. It seems aliens have found the capsule and interpreted the recording as a call for war. Now it's on. The attackers come in the form of 80s arcade game images.

It's that connection to the arcade that pulls Adam into Kevin's world after a military base on Guam is attacked by the video game Galaga. They soon find a message from the Aliens telling them that this is the first challenge for the rights to the Earth. Adam gets a hand from Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage.

There's a bit of romance between Michelle Monaghan and Adam, Josh meets the love of his life, a character from a video game. There's plenty of giant arcade play as the attacks start happening. A giant Pac-Man roams the streets of New York. Eventually the Earth is saved and all is well enough.

It made me laugh occasionally and I was happy to have seen it. I'd want to watch it again someday. I keep meaning to watch all my favorite Adam Sandler movies in a marathon but there's so much I still haven't watched.

Tremors: Shrieker Island 2020 Written by Brian Brightly and Don Michael Paul, directed by John Michael Paul. This is the 7th Tremors film, JMP is the director of Tremors 5: Bloodlines and the 6th film Tremors: A Cold Day In Hell. I've not seen any of his other films except for Death Race 4: Beyond Anarchy. The rest don't seem to interest me much.

A billionaire hunting enthusiast has had four graboids grown and placed on his island. He's set up a hunting party for other rich assholes. Of course, those guys are in over their head and one by one his paying customers get chomped on by one of my favorite tunneling monsters. Also on the island are some seismic researchers, Caroline Langrishe is in charge and Jon Heder is the comic relief. Caroline is also the mother of Bert Gummer's son, Bert is of course played by Michael Gross, his son Travis is played by Jamie Kennedy in the 5th and 6th films.  Travis is in jail so Caroline sends Jon to round up his father. Bert's gone native and living in the wilderness. Still, he comes and takes on his old enemy.

The hunters do manage to mortally wound the graboid they encountered but it gets tougher and tougher to survive against the graboids and shriekers. The later have developed a new shriek that incapacitates the humans. Things look better once Bert arrives but soon enough the rich douche bag in charge has locked him up in an old bunker. Some people are so arrogant they deserve to get eaten by graboids. There's plenty of running and screaming. Just what you don't need with graboids around.

The movie looks great, during the day there are lush tropical forests and plenty of explosions, at night the scenes are lit with flames and explosions. Who ever was doing the flame effects was really good at their job. One by one the monsters are defeated, finally the last beast is left and it's a bitter sweet moment as Bert disappears into the flying dirt. Michael Gross has said he'd like to do another movie but he's 73 and it could be a couple more years before it happens and he might be too old to do the action stuff.  I enjoyed the movie and thought it was a nice addition to the series. Kind of wraps it up but still leaves a door open.

Tar 2020

Tar 2020 Written by Timothy Nuttall and Aaron Wolf, directed by Aaron Wolf.

It's another movie based on a monster from the dirt, jazzed up by putting the monster in the La Brea Tar Pits. Nothing too original here. Nice to see Timothy Bottoms and Graham Greene but that's about it. Watched on Amazon Prime, not going to need to see this one again.

Friday Night Movies 832

Needful Things 1993 Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, screenplay by WD Richter, directed by Fraser C Heston.

Ed Harris is the sheriff of Castle Rock, Bonnie Bedelia is his girlfriend, Max Von Sydow is a demon. Max has opened an antique shop in Castle Rock. He's got great stuff and the price is cheap, in cash. It's the favors Max wants, those have a great cost. It's why I don't go to antique shops.

I hadn't seen it before, I bought the DVD some time back but it's just been sitting in a box waiting to get watched for a good long while. I'm endeavoring to clean out that box and get those DVDs put in their final resting place other boxes.

I liked the characters and the script was fairly decent. I thought it poked along at the beginning, I'm not always a fan of the melodrama that fills in between the interesting bits before the real action starts. Once Max gets to manipulating the locals things get more interesting, more often. Nice production values, I watch so many low budget films, it's a welcome change to see some money on the screen.

I was glad I picked up the DVD, I enjoyed it more than many SK adaptations. It certainly has a better sense of humor than a lot of the films made from his books. Books that I haven't ever read. I liked it enough to think I might actually try to get back to it some time in the future. Typically, I seem to have liked it more than the critics did when it came out. Oh, well, nothing new there.

Tomorrow I'm going to watch the extended TV version of the film, then I probably don't need to see it for a while. That's good, that box of DVDs aren't going to watch themselves. They have no hands, how could they work the DVD player. The TV version is just over 3 hours long. You can watch the original in the title link above and the long version here.

Psycho Goreman 2020 Written and directed by Steven Kostanski. It's a Canadian film and Steve is part of the Astron-6 Production Company. His previous films include Manborg, Father's Day, The Void and Leprechaun Returns. This isn't an Astron-6 release, it's on the RLJE Films label. They produce a lot of genre TV and film. You can stream PG on Shudder and it just come out on Blu-ray.

That girl in the picture, that's Mimi, she's a real fuckin' asshole. The kid to the left is her brother Luke, she mistreats him something fierce. Mimi mistreats most everyone, she's loud and selfish, she wants her own way and no one can tell her what to do. After a deadly game of Crazy Ball, Luke has to dig his own grave in the back yard. Luke strikes a coffin like box that's got a glowing red jewel on it. Mimi gloms onto that. They get scared when purple light pours out of the coffin.They fill in the hole just in time to go to bed.

The next day the dirt is out of the hole and soon after we meet the Arch-duke of Nightmares. He's been sealed in the coffin for a long time, placed there by The Templars, the powerful alien beings that defeated him and stopped his galaxy destroying rampage. Mimi doesn't care about his backstory but the flashbacks to his past were quite entertaining. Mimi renames him Psycho Goreman, or PG for short, after it turns out that the glowing jewel gives her complete control over him. Now starts the Arch-duke's nightmare. She bosses him about and he threatens her with a slow torturous death. Mimi soon has PG out on the town and some of the locals aren't always fairing too well after their encounter with an alien.

More crazy things happen and there are plenty of laughs. There's a fair bit of gore and the make up effects are mostly pretty good. The film looks great considering it had a budget of $1,500,000 Canadian dollars. Money well spent. I sure plan to watch it over again.

Science Fiction Sunday 628

Post Apocalyptic Commando Shark 2018 Written and directed by Sam Qualiana.

I thought this was very like the low budget Troma films of the 70s and 80s. Sam's got all the right elements, poorly written and nonsensical script, amateur actors, no money, bad props and crap sets. Many scenes are filmed outdoors. He does have some CGI but it's homemade and low-res. I have a fondness for some of the Troma library but it's a tiny number considering they've got a thousand films in their library. Much of what Troma produced is absolute crap, nearly unwatchable. Most of what is watchable isn't often re-watchable.

Sam's story takes place after some sort of apocalyptic happening and the Russians have invaded the US with an squad of killer commando sharks. The shark guys are humanoid with an obviously rubber mask over the head of the actor. The shark men machine gun everyone then bite some of them on the neck. There's a sort of military, none of whom are competent. Some of them even blow themselves up. In fact. most of the characters in the film are dim witted. You often the same sort of characters in a Troma film.

The groups battle it out for control of the US, there's a high body count and a low joke count. Good jokes that is, most of them sucked. It drags on and on, I was kind of bored, often the same state was arrived at while watching a Troma film. Glad it was on Amazon Prime, I'm not stuck with a DVD to store or flog. I wouldn't want to watch it again.

Shifter 2020 Written and directed by Jacob Leighton Burns, Jacob wrote the story with Zachary Burns.

A young woman invents a time machine, using it ultimately kills her.The woman is a depressed and introverted character that I found tiresome. She sure was prone to bad decisions and repeatedly using the machine is one of them. The core idea of the scientist being destroyed by his creation is pretty common but the more entertaining films usually have something more interesting happening. This lacked the money to do much, the IMDb says the film had a $30,000 budget. There's little money up on the screen. There are hardly any characters and most of them are uninteresting to me. Not much entertainment value here for me. I wouldn't want to watch it again.

Friday Night Movies 829

Throwback 2014 Written and directed by Travis Bain.

Jack and Kent are searching a remote North Queensland park for the lost treasure of some legendary bushwhacker. They luck out and Kent drowns Jack for the bag of gold. Jack isn't dead yet, he gives chase. Kent runs into a yowie, that's an Aussie Bigfoot, that's been killing people in the area for a while. He manages to escape, only to run into a police detective called McNabb. The detective thinks Kent is a serial killer and chains him to a log. The creature turns up and McNabb takes early retirement after his head is ripped off.

There's plenty of running in the nice scenery as Jack, Kent, the yowie and a park ranger called Rhiannon battle for survival. Half of them get out alive. There's nothing that stands out in the film, except the nice scenery, it's pretty much average to me. I might watch it again but I doubt that's going to happen. It was on Amazon Prime as is the this next movie.

They Reach 2020 Director Sylas Dall co-wrote the screenplay with Bry Troyer.

A teen girl called Jessica brings home a box of junk to her father. They both like tinkering with electronic stuff. In the box is a tape recorder that's cursed. Jessica cuts her hand and drops of blood fall on the tape recorder. A demon is released and it starts killing people. It's a nasty beast and nearly everyone dies. Luckily it has a happy ending.

It's an ambitious project for an Indy film. It's set in 1979 and they do a fairly good job of that. It's mostly well filmed, a couple of times I had to go back to see what happened, some scenes are really quick and shot in dark settings. I found it a bit pokey at first but it soon picks up the pace. There's plenty of gore and the occasional joke. There's a lot of SF and horror in-jokes that I kind of ignored. I liked the teens and some of the adults.

I wouldn't say it's anything more than average but I was entertained most of the time. Like the first movie there were times when they paused so long in a scene that I was guessing what would happen next and being right a lot of the time. I'd still watch it again but doubt that's going to happen. No matter, there's way too many movies for me to getting to anyway.

Friday Night Movies 823

Evil Takes Root: The Curse Of The Batibat 2020 Director Chris W Freeman co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Mack.

A woman finds a monster in her bedroom and the police find her body in a tree. Before that she had called her ex and the message brings him to her small town only to find her dead. Things turn weirder when the daughter becomes possessed. Turns out mom's company had done some clear cutting and unwittingly unleashed an ancient forest demon. It's come to visit and it's not a happy critter. The monster wasn't too badly portrayed.

The movie is pretty much a standard monster slog to the end. There's plenty of running and yelling in the woods. It's pokey and there's nothing really unique that stands out. There some fair to middling graphics and a passable production. I can't complain much about the acting. Sadly, it's still some below average. I'd give it a 4 before I would give it a 5 on the IMDb, it's current score is a 4.1. I did like the African priest character.

H0us3 2018 Director Manolo Munguia co-wrote the screenplay with Sergio Martinez. It's a Spanish picture, dubbed in English. It's pretty much shot in one room in a big house.

Computers figure heavily in this film, the characters were all computer students in university. Most of them haven't kept in touch much but they've all come to have dinner and stay in a big old house. There's not much going on but them all talking about stuff. One of the more annoying guys tells everyone he's cracked the password on a secret file from the dark web. He's found some code and put it on his phone. Now his phone can see 30 seconds into the future.

Everyone gets all excited wondering about the implications of the software and what it could mean if the government had it. They alter it to see 12 days into the future and find everything was on fire. Everyone freaks out. It takes about 90 minutes to get to that point in this 104 minute movie.

I didn't much care for the ending and the sting before the credits. It's ponderously slow and quite dull at times. I watched it on Amazon Prime and wished they would add variable speed to their player. Anything to get to the end of the movie quicker. I wouldn't need to see either of these again.