Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987)

Director: Andy Sidaris

Writer: Andy Sidaris

Composer: Gary Stockdale

Starring: Ronn Moss, Dona Speir, Hope Marie Carlton, Harold Diamond, Rodrigo Obregon, Cynthia Brimhall, Patty Duffek, Wolf Larson, Lory Green, Rustam Branaman

More info: IMDb

Tagline: This Ain't No Hula!

Plot: Two drug enforcement agents are killed on a private Hawaiian island. Donna and Taryn, two operatives for The Agency, accidentally intercept a delivery of diamonds intended for drug lord Seth Romero, who takes exception and tries to get them back. Soon other Agency operatives get involved, and a full-scale fight to the finish ensues, complicated here and there by an escaped snake made deadly by having eating cancer-infected rats!!!

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Yes.

It's an Andy Sidaris flick.  I love stories with lots of plot. At one minute eleven seconds in...

BAM!  This guy knows how to make a movie!  He also puts in awful songs while people do mundane things like fly around Hawaii.  Get on with the story, damnit!

That's more like it.  Did someone mention plot?  Here's some more of it...

This picture is loaded with plot, bad acting, worse jokes and puns and more but most of it is pretty fun.  Check this shit out!

That scene alone (and don't forget about all of the plot in the picture, natural and enhanced) is worth buying this DVD set off Amazon for less than five bucks (12 freaking movies!!!).  The only issue, really, is there's too much story and time wasted between the, ahem, plot and kick ass action scenes.  Trimming this down 10-15 minutes would help.  It's a great flick to slap in for a party.  It's not the home run it could have been but is sure is a fuck load better than it deserves.  I dug it.  And another thing, for a guy who made a bunch of low budget goofy picture, he sure didn't skimp on imagination when it came to the opening credits.  He gets major points for even going the extra six feet to do something different.

Defiance (2008)

Director: Edward Zwick

Writers: Clayton Frohman, Edward Zwick, Nechama Tec

Composer: James Newton Howard

Starring: Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos, Allan Corduner, Mark Feuerstein, Tomas Arana, Jodhi May, Kate Fahy, Iddo Goldberg, Iben Hjejle, Martin Hancock

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Freedom begins with an act of defiance!

Plot: Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village in order to protect themselves and about 1,000 Jewish non-combatants.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? No.

OK, I liked that there's a good deal of non-English spoken by not just some of the smaller characters but by the leads Craig and Schreiber.  It sounded legit to me but then again I don't speak Russian or whatever.  The only thing I know is "moose and squirrel".  And Craig and Schreiber do a fine job in their roles.  But I couldn't help but feel throughout the entire picture that the real story was far more interesting than what's being shown on the screen.   The film makers probably had a hell of a time trying to keep the audience from being bored of shooting in essentially one location, the forest.  Then there's the Hollywood refugee look.  For folks who lived in the forest for months and years they sure didn't look it.  Everyone looked just right.  The hair, position of the clothing, hats, etc.  It looked like there was someone behind the scenes making sure things were in place...and there was, of course; it's just that we shouldn't think about it.  It's supposed to be invisible. The cliches are all over the place.  Largely, it was OK and just this side of dull.  It was hardly the compelling story it felt like it was trying to be. 

Mr. No Legs (1979)

Director: Ricou Browning

Writer: Jack Cowden

Composer: ???

Starring: Richard Jaeckel, Ted Vollrath, Rance Howard, Ron Slinker, Lloyd Bochner, Joie Chitwood, John Agar, Courtney Brown, Joan Murphy, Luke Halpin, Billy Blueriver, Jim Kelly

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Don't Cross Him or He'll Cut You Down to Size

Plot: Meet Mr. No Legs! Deadly professional hit-man for a drug syndicate... and a limbless cripple! With his cool wheelchair, armed with shotguns and shurikens, and his amazing kung fu skills he means trouble for everyone he confronts, even his own boss! Things get ugly when a unlucky drug dealer kills his girl by an accident, especially because the girl's brother is a cop! And No Legs apparently have his own plans how to take over the whole business.

My rating: 5.5/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

THIS SPOILER ALERT HAS LEGS!!!  YARRRRRR!!!

What a great poster!  What a great tagline!  What a great idea!  What an amazing title!!!  Too bad it's slow as fuck and there's very little 'no legs' action.   Sure, Mr. No Legs gets a couple of lines but Mr. No Legs doesn't do jack squat until one hour in, leaving you 25 minutes left in the picture.  It's a great ass kicking scene but a picture sold to the public like it was deserves more.

8 minutes later he shows up at a warehouse to take care of the bad guys with his tricked out wheelchair complete with machine guns and ninja stars only to be gunned down dead within seconds?!?!  We've still got almost 20 minutes to go!  The music score is cheap and often feels out of place. I've seen this 2 or 3 times already and each time I think it's going to get better but it doesn't.  I REALLY want to like this film but when the titular character has less than ten minutes of screen time and he's barely being used to his full potential, you've got to question the film makers' salt.  Director Browning was previously known for working with animals, directing episodes of FLIPPER (1964) and GENTLE BEN (1967).  Take a few seconds and read about Ted Vollrath, the man who was Mr. No Legs.  He was an admirable man. 

The Garden (2006)

Director: Don Michael Paul

Writer: Sam Bozzo

Composer: Jon Lee

Starring: Lance Henriksen, Brian Wimmer, Adam Taylor Gordon, Claudia Christian, Sean Young, Victoria Justice, Erik Walker, Ariana Richmond, Jennifer Lutheran, Rick Barker, Shawn Howell, Dale Gibson, Mike Watson, Tad Griffith, Danielle McKee, P. David Miller, Lonnie Partridge

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Armageddon is at hand and the final prophecy is about to be fulfilled.

Plot: A troubled young boy and his father on a road trip stumble upon a rural farm where the elderly owner has sinister plans for the both of them involving witchcraft and evil.

Movies

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again?  Nah.

Neat little flick.  Lance Henriksen's doing a fine job; the rest of the cast, too.  The story might feel a little slow but as you get closer to the end it ramps up to a violent and bloody finale.  And it's not the ending that was fulfilling so much as the final act when things started to make more sense and the story was readying for the climax.  It's a nice picture with a score that creeps along in the background.  Anchor Bay released here in the States and the disc comes with a few extras including a commentary track with director Don Michael Paul.

Nekromantik 2 (1991)

Director: Jorg Buttgereit

Writers: Jorg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen

Composers: Hermann Kopp, Monika M., John Boy Walton

Starring: Monika M., Mark Reeder, Lena Braun, Jorg Buttgereit, Carola Ewers, Astrid Ewerts, Florian Koerner von Gustorf, Kathe Kruse

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The Return of the loving dead!

Plot: A female nurse desperately tries to hide her feelings of necrophilia from her new boyfriend, but still has pieces of the corpse of the first movie's hero in her possession.

My rating: 7/10

Will I watch it again? Yes.

This one picks up right where NEKROMANTIK (1988) left off.

Elvira's Haunted Hills (2001)

Director: Sam Irvin

Writers: Cassandra Peterson, John Paragon

Composer: Eric Allaman

Starring: Cassandra Peterson, Richard O'Brien, Mary Scheer, Scott Atkinson, Heather Hopper, Mary Jo Smith, Gabi Andronache, Jerry Jackson, Theodor Danetti, Lucia Maier, Constantin Cotimanis, Remus Cernat, Mark Pierson, Rob Paulsen

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Evil. Terror. Lust.  Some girls really know how to party!

Plot: Set back in 1851 in the Carpathia Mountains of Romania, Elvira the Mistress of the Dark" en route to Paris with her maidservant Zou Zou for a can-can revue, stop for the night at a haunted castle owned by a certain Vladimir Hellsubus whose long dead wife bears an eerie resemblance to Elvira.



My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? Maybe.

I really dig Cassandra Peterson.  She's sharp, she's a B-movie nerd and she's fucking hilarious.

OK, that, too.

Her comedic timing and sense of humor is tops.  She takes stupid, corny jokes and makes them funny.  Yeah, she's not for everyone's taste but, for my money, she delivers the goods.  I laughed quite a bit but the picture does suffer from a little drag now and then.  It could use some trimming for sure but at its core, it's a fun, sweet homage to the Roger Corman Poe pictures of the sixties.  The sets are amazing and the setting of mid-nineteenth century Romania is fantastic.  And how about Scott Atkinson's (as Dr. Bradley Bradley) superb George Sanders impersonation?  Holy shit was that fantastic! You can tell this is a labor of love for Peterson.  She sunk her own money into this when no studio would touch it.  They might have been right that this could be a hard sell to audiences but then I'm glad she made it anyway.  I should probably get my hands on some of her TV show episodes.  That was some really funny stuff.  She's super talented and it's a damn shame she's not still active with Elvira.  It's a wonderfully creative character that's so entertaining it should last forever, even past her eventual death.  They could do a TALES FROM THE CRYPT Crypt Keeper kind of thing.  I'll volunteer to work the metal rods to move her arms and shit.  Why not?

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)

Original title: San Daikaiju: Chikyu Saidai no Kessen

Director: Ishiro Honda

Writer: Shin'ichi Sekizawa

Composer: Akira Ifukube

Starring: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuiko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hisaya Ito, Minoru Takada

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The Three-Headed Monster battles Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan for the world!

Plot: After a meteorite unleashes a three-headed beast upon Tokyo, Mothra tries to unite with Godzilla and Rodan to battle the extraterrestrial threat.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? Probably not.  I've got a better idea...

The new Godzilla movie is days away (I'm posting this a few weeks out from when I watched it) and I had the gang over for some Man In Suit double feature 60s madness.  I have a love/hate relationship with these kind of pictures.  I LOVE the monster action but hate the human drama.  These flicks invariably waste too much of our time on shit nobody cares about until the monsters show up and oh how quickly we turn into giddy fanboys when that happens.   There's next to nothing, monster-wise, until Godzilla shows up 36 minutes in and even then it's only a fucking tease.  He pops his head out of the ocean and does that classic scream and it's back to boring ole human junk.  It's like when you order at a restaurant.  Ten minutes go by and the server shows up, making you think you're super close to getting your food, but they only bring you the ketchup or something to tease you and they keep bringing things out little by little.  I hate that shit.  Bring on the fucking monsters!!!

Halfway through the picture Godzilla returns to do some clobbering but that's yet another tease.  It's at the 50 minute mark when he meets Rodan and the shit starts to fly.  We only get short segments of monster action but it's fucking fantastic.  And then there's the huge ass fight between Ghidorah against Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan.  FUCKING AWESOME!!!  It's epic and all kinds of fun. 

And really, you could probably cut the first half hour of human drama and it would hardly affect the actual story.  I figured out that the best way to enjoy these is to remove the monster action and edit it together into a Man In Suit greatest hits collection.  Just one more thing to add to my massive to-do list.  And, yes, it's worth sitting through the meal just to get the desert.