I Sell the Dead - recently available on Netflix Instant, I was advised by a friend who rented it to wait and buy it when I was initially going to purchase, he said it was just so-so. He was a liar. Burke and Hare by way of Evil Dead 2[b] and Re-Animator[/b], with Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden (who is every bit as entertaining in front of the camera as behind), Ron Perlman, and Angus Scrimm. See it. Now.

This month will be "Hwang Appreciation Month" at my website (I'll still watch other movies, but I'll only review movies featuring Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee).

Film #1

5 Pattern Dragon Claws - South Korean production starring Hwang and Brucesploitation veteran Dragon Lee, directed and produced by that dynamic duo of awfulness: Godfrey Ho and Thomas Tang. This film is pretty conventional by their standards, and Hwang does a solid job fighting in it. The movie features stock cues from Spaghetti Westerns, 80s synth music, and 70s jazz/porno music. It also has some enjoyably silly dubbed dialogue. Worth a look, although not a classic by any means.

Hugo is a masterpiece, a real return to form from Scorsese after slightly diminishing returns for his last few movies (though of the last four, only Shutter Island is what I would call less than solid, and that's still an interesting movie).

Super 8--I have to say, as a love letter to the early 80s films of Steve Spielberg, this is excellent. As a film on its own, it's also pretty damned excellent--for most of the running time. The characters feel natural and the interaction between the young leads is marvelous. Not to mention it's hard not to love a scene where a boy is shown falling for a girl because she does a really good zombie act.

Where the film falters, really, is in the nature of its monster. It does an excellent job of making the monster a shadowy, menacing beast who drags victims off into the night--and I swear its roar has to have been intentionally designed to sound vaguely like the Id Monster. But then, as NeoKefka put it, the film suddenly gives an E.T. ending to Jaws. I mean, this creature was specifically shown eating people and suddenly seeing it get its spaceship running is meant to be inspiring. I can see what J.J. Abrams was trying for, but it doesn't quite work. It doesn't ruin the film, but it still seems like a miscalculation. (Though the monsters eyes being a solid, milky white when it's "evil" and suddenly having very human irises and pupils is just plain stupid)

All in all, though, I really enjoyed this film. And the inclusion of the kids' Super 8 zombie movie in the end credits is a delightful touch.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil--I was worried this just wasn't gonna live up to the anticipation I had built up for it. I needn't have worried. While there are one or two bits that maybe don't quite work the way they should (we're still doing gay jokes, people?), I loved the whole thing. Some of the jokes had already been spoiled in the promo clips, but I still laughed at them--and others that were new to me had me cackling like a hyena. Definitely a truly great send-up of the deranged hillbilly horror genre.

The Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Mummy - The Aztec Mummy is a big dumb goofy mix of vampire, frankenstein, and mummy myths. He walks slowly and has a gauze-filled growl and big round eyes and I laughed loudly at him. In one funny scene, the Aztec mummy does something that the entire main cast of the movie failed to do - it killed everyone involved with the "Japanese" dragon gang and ended the pain that the first seventy minutes of an 87 minute movie (or thereabouts) caused. Oh, if only the Aztec Mummy featured so prominently in the title had appeared somewhere before the last 10 minutes of the movie. I don't know what they could have done, but it could not have been any more boring than what transpired on-screen.

The moral of this fable concerning this Something Weird DVD double feature is thus - The movie with the dumb uninteresting title - Doctor of Doom - is frequently the fun movie. The one with the weird, allegedly hip cult movie title - Wrestling Women vs. Aztec Mummy - is almost skippable. (I do recommend taking in the final 15 minutes, just to enjoy the mummy and cringe at the horrible comedy relief.)

Next up on my Netflix list - Kiss Me Deadly - after a succession of tepid mediocrity (The Spirit, Big Trouble) and some moderate surprising successes (Postal), it is going to be good to watch a bonafide classic for once.

Vamp

So, who making this movie decided that Grace Jones was sexy, and then proceeded to make her wear white make-up and dance around on stage?

Who ever it was should probably be in an asylum by now.

He is. Just down the hall, pass the watercooler/Vallium machine, turn left and pass the double doors marked 'Hollywood Ward. Ask for Jim.

Fully agree with Mudpuppy about Super 8. It's the first monster movie I've seen where the monster action actually detracted from the quality of the movie. In addition to his gripes, it bugged me that they made such a big deal out of it being a subterranean creature when the only way it could look less built for burrowing was if it was a chicken, and the fact that it looks just like Four Arms from Ben 10. What's the deal with JJ Abrams having basically the exact same monster design in every one of his movies?

I really enjoyed the film but yeah the monster had serious problems. One question I had was that at times we "see" it wrecking stores and tossing major appliances through the air yet when it came to stealing engine blocks from a downtown car lot it was totally ninja.

Yeah, I was gonna mention the subterranean thing, too. For a subterranean creature it has incredibly huge, functional eyes. And no offense to Neville Page, but people gave Patrick Tatopolous crap for the monster in Outlander resembling Zilla--yet Page has been pretty much just tweaking the Cloverfield design every time Abrams asks him to design a monster. Nice work if you can get it.

Bad Teacher--Ultimately this is a very generic "in your face" comedy about a "likable jerk". The trouble is that they forgot you need to actually like the jerk or the movie fails. The title character here is ultimately not sympathetic and her eventual turn towards being slightly less of a jerk feels completely out of the blue, like the screenwriters were checking things off a list. Besides, it's kind of hard to get behind somebody who hates being a teacher in a story set in Illinois, where I'm fully aware that becoming a teacher is not something you can just do like getting a job at a retail store. She had to spend several years working towards this goal, in a time when actually good teachers are getting treated like entitled thugs for trying to educate kids for a pittance. Doesn't exactly make me want to cheer her on.

That said, Lucy Punch (she of the very annoying laugh in Hot Fuzz) is great as the "antagonistic" teacher who wants to bring our "heroine" down.

Yeah, I'm not sure teachers need bad press right now considering the Wisconsin stuff.

Furthermore, unlike the Cloverfield monster, the Tatapoulos Godzilla actually looked good (leaving aside the question of its propriety as what it was supposed to be). There's something to be gained by using it as a starting point for new monster designs.

Yeah! Even though I disagree with the sometimes-heard fan assertion that GINO would be "a good monster movie if it just wasn't called Godzilla" (incorrect, that movie is not good regardless of the name), I agree wholeheartedly that its titular monster would be a perfectly fine monster design "if it just wasn't called Godzilla". (One of the reasons I loved the animated series based on the movie was the downplaying of "OMG it's GODZILLA!" and the focus on a number of very coolly-designed monsters of the week.)

It is truly one of the best films of the year, and the 3D is well worth the extra charge. It is dizzying at times as the camera soars through old Paris. The only thing I found missing was some of the actual nasty reasons Georges Méliès ended up losing pretty much everything, this is because not too many people teach the fact that pioneer Thomas Edison wasn't just in the forefront of technology but also in movie piracy. He had agents in Paris strike copies of Méliès films and then they would take them back to America to distribute them without paying Georges Méliès a dime. Without the American market such expensive films like "A Trip to the Moon" never saw profit. Eventually larger French and American companies forced him out of business.

Movie Mike said:

' The only thing I found missing was some of the actual nasty reasons Georges Méliès ended up losing pretty much everything, this is because not too many people teach the fact that pioneer Thomas Edison wasn't just in the forefront of technology but also in movie piracy. He had agents in Paris strike copies of Méliès films and then they would take them back to America to distribute them without paying Georges Méliès a dime. Without the American market such expensive films like "A Trip to the Moon" never saw profit. Eventually larger French and American companies forced him out of business.'


I did not know about this. I think I just learned something.