Reviews by Sh4wn

i've seen the premise before, in fact they used similar in the master of horror series, but this one does everything it should as a movie.

a young couple move to a new house and the neighbor proceeds to taunt them and then haunt them. its right off the bat that the neighbor starts to mess with them...putting poison oak in a bunch of flowers, horse laxative in chocolates. then they try to get rid of him and he takes it personally and proceeds to try to kill them. he's a religious nut with a fetish for pain. do the math...this gets down right sick. but with an odd sense of humor to it.

theres a lot of slow build up including some awful acting by one of the lead actresses. all the cast is pretty second rate, but all in all hold their own. more like tv acting than movie acting, but mostly good.

the movie went places i didn't expect, got me churning in my seat, and generally left me moved if disgusted. thats pretty damn good for a "never heard of it" film.

definately see this one...it takes the ordinary and leaves you with a unique experience.

an old school early 70's toxic waste and mutant animal horror. pretty good overall if not especially exciting.

a photojournalist goes to a wealthy family's island home to photograph the waste/poisons that they are letting loose on the island. he begins to notice something is amiss. and thats about the whole movie. from there he ends up on the island with the family who are gathered to celebrate the old man's birthday. people start going missing.

what is unusual about this movie is that there are 100's of frogs everywhere and the family keeps talking about how big they are and how so many keep them awake at night with the amount of noise. the entire movie your are led to believe the frogs are going to start killing people but what actually happens is different. snakes kill people, lizards kill people, spiders, birds, alligators, even a turtle kills a person but no frog kills anyone. the movie ends with the old man left alone because everyone else is either dead or has left him. the frogs start breaking into the house for the final killer frog attack....and he has a heart attack and dies....and then frogs jump on him. ok.


while its a bit disappointing that the movie didn't use the frogs as killers its also more believable that they didn't. the special effects if you can call them that...are really low budget (like spiders somehow capturing a man using the swamp tree hangings as web....but on the other hand the web covering of the man at the end of the sequence is pretty empressive.) you can imagine if they used frogs as killers this movie would've been beyond campy into just bad territory.

in the end the movie is slow, not very exciting, nothing like scary, but ultimately nicely done story thats pretty entertaining and interesting.

worth a watch if nothing else

updates as watche/rewatched

"full metal jacket" i had never seen this before and have heard how great it was as a war movie. i suppose some of that honor given to it made me have high expectations which didn't fully get met. its a very good movie. for me, a few things seemed a bit overdone or somewhat unbelievable. for instance the high points of two major parts of the movie. the 'slow' soldier in the 'head' while pretty stunning it struck me as odd the dorm guard who paces the room seems surprised to find him in the 'head'. how did he not know he was there and with his rifle? the reaction of the 3 characters in the scene are way over the top and not very convincing. then the final scene where the troops have found and wounded a sniper. convincing would be if they shot the sniper to make sure she didn't detonate a grenade and kill them all. instead they all stand around her and convince a particular soldier to 'put the sniper out of their misery' except to make it thoroughly unbelievable the sniper, a Vietnamese, starts saying in english 'shoot me' over and over and over again while wrenching in pain on the ground. it just wasn't believable. honestly a lot of the plot turns weren't all that believable either. not so much in a respect that they couldn't happen, i just wasn't convinced by the acting nor script.
all that said, its still a very good movie that will take you on a ride through vietnam and the experiences of a couple of characters as they try to survive.
maybe i've seen other movies about the war that shocked me more, but this is still very nicely conceived and executed.

this is another 50 movie mixed lot of things. i'll post as i watch.

"the great american snuff film" supposedly based on a real story...its clearly not. this could have surfaced as something meaningful had it built more of a story around it rather than just the torture, but it ultimately fails to do anything but dwell in the degradation of women. its a shame really, for an unknown director and unknown actors they accomplish a convincing film. the acting is good, the filming is good, the pacing is good, the writing/dialog not bad, the feeling convincing, the soundtrack suitable. all in all everything seems to go together to make a great film....but....the entire movie is about two demented men who kidnap and torture two women over the period of several days and they do it with the idea of making a real snuff film. the journal of the supposed real man lends some believability to the story, and also brings some of the back story into how he and his animal-like sidekick got to this point. ultimately you'll spend an hour and a half watching the director savor the idea of a snuff film and the mind set of the characters who do this sort've thing. you'll see two women who have no chance and no real back story tortured and degraded as meat. and nothing more...there's really nothing to this film other than the filmmakers wanting to get off on killing women. the question becomes "why?". what purpose does this movie afford? if you like the idea of torturing and submitting women...this bs may turn you on. otherwise the whole film is just wasted talent (and its a fair talent they display). sad. ("C-" good technical work, seriously lacks respect for women)

"bimbos b.c." we've put this one on two seperate times and have yet to make it through 5 minutes of it. awful. starts with some blonde woman traipsing around the woods in back of her house...i guess thats suppose to be b.c. looking. she has a spear-ish thing and shes wearing fur with some go-go leg warmers.....as i remember it cuts to some mobile home office thing...who cares...you won't watch it. clealy a vhs transfer..probably filmed on vhs. ("F-")

"kill syndrome" your classic texas chainsaw massacre rip-off destroyed by utter lack of any skills in movie making. we didn't make it far through this before turning it off too. it was clear to me early on that this was going no where. amateur hour of the worst kind (F)

so far i've only watched driller killer.

driller killer: reeks of 70's new york art scene in every way. its an ugly film with awful music. i guess the beginning screen before the title exclaiming "this movie should be played loud" may be true....the louder you play it the less you'll hear it. it'll simply be noise and that probably suits the film.

the plot if you discount the random stuff that happens all over...is about an painter who is trying to finish his master piece and supposedly going insane doing it. hard to follow how he goes insane...like much of the movie its pretty randoms. there's some allusion to him hearing voices from his other paintings. there's also some notion about an band (awful velvet underground wannabe incompetent slop) that rents a room by them and is driving him (and us) nuts with their non-stop racket. but the most important moment is a commercial they watch on tv about a belt battery pack product called "proto-pak". reno, the artist, gets the idea from this to use a drill to kill bums. what?! he murders a few randomly about 2/3rds the way through the movie. eventually finishes his painting and his gallery dealer tells him its "technical" crap and then reno proceeds to kill everyone around him...not just bums.

the whole movie is about the real world rejecting the passionate artist...usually a telltale sign of an incompetent artist whining. sadly this film is directed by the main actor and what we then get to see is how much of a failure he is. frankly i've seen worse. theirs a lot going wrong with this film...not the least of which is its pretentious art house "too-cool-to-bother-to-make-sense" attitude and its anti-establishment "do-everything-bad-because-its-cool" which just reeks of talentless hacks pretending. but then there is a story, it does manage to move forward, it has a sort've cult charm, and there is some nice gore. unfortunately theres no likable people in the film...the problem with the pretentiousness is we don't care...and so what could be watchable falls flat.

a tiny bit of shock value for random violence, a tiny bit of cult value for its 70's flavor and once banned status, but not much of a winner here.

i loved willow as a kid. i would have been about 14 when it came out and i honestly enjoyed it. i played the willow game for nintindo over and over again (it was sort've like early zelda but better). i had seen parts of the movie again but never sat through the whole thing until now. after all these years its still enjoyable...if, of course, a bit dated.

the story, apparently written by lucas, begins as a baby noah story and quickly turns to blatant lord of the rings rip off. lucas of course has none of the skills that tolkien mastered in storytelling and 'world building'. lucas instead gives us the hollywood version of that. nothing bad but it does then reek of the time it was created...in this case the 80's.

its not unlike his ewok stories either...which will turn some people away from this quickly. in fact warwick davis was in both the ewok adventures, some of the other star wars films as well as this film.

willow is the story about a race of hobbits....oops nelwyns....that find a ring...i mean baby girl....and then have to set out on a long adventure to set things right. an evil force seeks the girl to destroy her. prophecy says she'll unseat the queen and so the evil force/queen...a sorcerer...wants her dead. standard fantasy fare. the nelwyn scenes are up there with the wizzard of oz for the sheer number of little people that are part of this film. there's no trickery resizing ala lord of the rings. and as far as i can see, the film is very respectful to them as people. they are in all respects a race here, nothing different than any other. along the way willow, the nelwyn that finds the baby and is charged with taking her to tir asleen, meets a bundle of characters. primarily madmartigan (val kilmer) and two brownies who add some comic flare to the movie as well as the 'good witch' fin raziel whom they need to defeat the queen.

all in all pretty predictable adventure...but also pretty entertaining.

filming wise its fairly cheesy fluff. overdone fantasy with some unfortunate attempts at special effects. any blue screen stuff is blatantly obvious to the point of nearly falling into laughable territory. the worse is the first overlay which is suppose to be this big monumental fairy godmother telling willow he's been 'choosen'. its frankly silly. the trolls in another bluescreen rendering are way off in tone but somehow this isn't so much an error as it is just noticable detail. (ie horribly bad but points out the 'otherworldly' of the beasts). not half as bad as the trolls themselves...which are more of a uglier harry and the hendersons.

this film has always received mixed reviews but for me it does a fine job and i still enjoy it. i'd still watch this any day over 90% of what hollywood puts out.

the people under the stairs was a bit retro even when it came out. like a smorgasbord of 80's movies meshed together in a guilty pleasure way. take 'goonies' add a bit of 'peter pan', and a bunch of 'trespass', an 'alice in wonderland' gone wrong, a twisted family that i'm not sure were they come from but i'm possitive its a combination of something wholesome and something more along the lines of texas chainsaw massacre. in the end you should have enough to make a wildly complex movie...but what you end up with is an odd humorous movie with some street smarts and a bit of horror for spice.

a family down on its luck is being evicted from the 'ghetto.' the youngest boy is enticed by a friend of the family to take part in a heist. two older men involved in the scheme have found a 'treasure map'; basically a letter discussing gold coins in the home of the landlord that 'owns all the ghetto.' they proceed to scope out the place but quickly get caught up inside the home instead. the couple has a young girl they abuse, and a whole bunch of zombie like boys they 'feed' in the basement. all the house is rigged to keep everything inside. once inside everything goes wrong and now they're just trying to get back out. thats the story, obviously theres more to it but on a whole thats the plot. you'll probably guess everything that happens for the most part.

then you're left with a cheesy treasure story straight out of goonies, a ghetto rising story thats improbable, an abuse story which is weird, not a whole lot of horror....and a mish mash of ideas that came together to be mildly amusing, watchable, but nothing grand. its probably a decent horror for younger viewers...minus some language, etc.

good but not great. it was scarier when i was younger...it also seemed better then too...

can't imagine i'll watch all of these so heres the ones i have:

"barely legal lesbian vampires" awful in every respect. barely legal in porn refers to young women pretending to be younger than they are. don't even think you'll get that here. there's no attempt made to act here and all but 2, maybe 3, of the people in this are in their 30's...40's...and beyond. the whole thing starts by a rather confusing old man giving his best halloween-psuedo-new-orleans-graveyard tour talking about the film your about to see...and channeling ed wood. ed wood would be disappointing by the poor quality of this sort've film. he clearly is the director or something...who cares... the plot...forget it...the most low rent porn is more complicated and better written. two fake lesbians have a fake makeout session...as awkward as can be...and one gets 'dumped'. a vampire takes her in as her new 'pretty one'...to her "castle" (probably a church somewhere in new jersey with enough trees obscuring the view of the parking lot)...other stuff happens like a long bondage scene complete with spanking (the least awkward moment in the entire film). some odd onlookers who act like they're getting off seeing this stuff...the acting is more like a lobotomized gene simmons impression. there is nothing sexy about any of this. the youngest actors are the best looking but barely in the film. the main actors (its a far stretch to call them that) are old...which is fine but they're ugly as hell. but there's little point to that even....this is like your uncle trying to make a porn movie but no one wanted to do it so instead they goofed around with the camera. when they do 'make out' its so impossibly awkward that its unappealing. if you think this is going to make you horny let me attest to the fact that this will do the exact opposite. this may titillate prepubescent boys who have never seen breasts but even they'd get more arousal outta a comic book than this. the most amazing thing about this film is that they manage to fill an hour and a half with nothing. oh i'm forgetting "muffy the vampire slayer" and her surprise ending....who cares. lets grade this an "F-...kill me now please!"


"driller killer" reeks of 70's new york art scene in every way. its an ugly film with awful music. i guess the beginning screen before the title exclaiming "this movie should be played loud" may be true....the louder you play it the less you'll hear it. it'll simply be noise and that probably suits the film. the plot if you discount the random stuff that happens all over...is about an painter who is trying to finish his master piece and supposedly going insane doing it. hard to follow how he goes insane...like much of the movie its pretty randoms. there's some allusion to him hearing voices from his other paintings. there's also some notion about an band (awful velvet underground wannabe incompetent slop) that rents a room by them and is driving him (and us) nuts with their non-stop racket. but the most important moment is a commercial they watch on tv about a belt battery pack product called "proto-pak". reno, the artist, gets the idea from this to use a drill to kill bums. what?! he murders a few randomly about 2/3rds the way through the movie. eventually finishes his painting and his gallery dealer tells him its "technical" crap and then reno proceeds to kill everyone around him...not just bums. the whole movie is about the real world rejecting the passionate artist...usually a telltale sign of an incompetent artist whining. sadly this film is directed by the main actor and what we then get to see is how much of a failure he is. frankly i've seen worse. theirs a lot going wrong with this film...not the least of which is its pretentious art house "too-cool-to-bother-to-make-sense" attitude and its anti-establishment "do-everything-bad-because-its-cool" which just reeks of talentless hacks pretending. but then there is a story, it does manage to move forward, it has a sort've cult charm, and there is some nice gore. unfortunately theres no likable people in the film...the problem with the pretentiousness is we don't care...and so what could be watchable falls flat. a tiny bit of shock value for random violence, a tiny bit of cult value for its 70's flavor and once banned status, but not much of a winner here. (grade = "C-")

the intro to the dvd is some cheesy guy that you'd see hosting a saturday b-movie fest...he says you may want to smash you're tv in after seeing this movie. he's no salesman of any sort. what more curious about this intro bit is that the movie itself is pretty damn good. why the intro was added for the dvd is beyond me...i could've done without it.

the movie itself is odd but well done zombie flick. as many zombie movies were at the time, this one tries to add some "new element" to make it stand out from the rest. here its formaldehyde sniffing prisoners. prisoners would have been enough and the stoned on formaldehyde is a bit dumb. but as a means of turning the dead into "not so dead" its clever and workable.

the whole plot is somehow suppose to center on the warden and the prisoners being re-located. except that never happens and it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. its not even truly a subplot. instead the movie is about a group of prisoners in a low security backwoods work prison dig a tunnel to the other side of a wired fence. the fence is no were near intimidating but you'll ignore that detail. the group that plans the escape is also the group that is heavily into sniffing the formaldehyde fumes. perhaps a plan by the lead to make 'dumb' his cronies to benefit his own escape. a second group of prisoners is not down for the escape but play mostly peripheral parts to the story. the group breaks out but one gets a bit high before he escapes...hes also the one trusted with the gun. in modern movies you could imagine where that would lead...in a 70's movie he simply trips and fires off the gun letting the guards know they're escaping. a small slapstick sort've moment. then the car chase lead the prisoners...in a truck full of formaldehyde...to crash into a cemetery and the guards lay on their shotgun and pistol justice. the prisoners, dead, fall into the spilled formaldehyde which has the unfortunate effect of keeping them....well...undead eventually. pretty much as soon as they are trying to bury the guys they come back to life and proceed to "destroy the living."

the rest of the film is about the zombies taking their revenge on the gaurds, etc, and its pretty solid stuff. they not only go back to sniff the formaldehyde but lather it on themselves. they are "melted" by the search light...which is only accomplished once in the film. there's a woman who they call out for....."give us the woman" (worse part of the movie) there are also some unfortunate bystanders.

the zombies move quickly, are a bit dull but to organize and plan, and are pretty convincingly creepy without all the high end special effects (its fairly simple makeup that does the job here)

nothing profound but a thoroughly enjoyable zombie film well worth the addition to any horror collection and essential, i'd say, to a zombie collection.

its hard to critique a nun who loves to talk about art.

what makes sister wendy's shows special is her approach to looking at art. she knows her stuff...she's well studied. there is a bit of hesitation that one has about the perspective of a nun looking at what can be controversial, even erotic, works. sister wendy does not hesitate to dive in and talk about these things...she almost seems to enjoy how beautiful her god has made these very human qualities available for our enjoyment. she's pretty radical...almost hippie like...for a nun. hell she's less goody goody than bob ross was and hes like the patron saint of stoner artists!! still, her ability to tackle these subjects is impressive but what makes her special is how she asks the viewer to approach any subject...any work of art...she simply asks that we look, think about what it could mean or what it means to us, and hopefully enjoy it.

the different places and works she visits are all interesting and her perspective is always knowledged.

the first dvd shows her looking at and talking about lascaux cave...unfortunately this is likely the most disappointing point in all her dvds. she is in the man made cave with reproductions of lascaux paintings and the film never shows even other source material from the original caves. honestly if i were the makers of this show, i would have eliminated that segment or shot it in caves that were more available for that kind of production. she is after all talking about cave are in general, albeit lascaux is truly the most amazing of that. the fake/reproduction cave is a blemish on the seriousness of the rest of the work...and its right at the beginning of disk 1. (to her credit she does mention that she is in the reproduction cave and not the real one)