Related to Robot Jox in name only, Crash and Burn is actually a lazy, low-effort riff on The Terminator and, bafflingly, The Thing. While Charles Band productions occasionally swung for the rafters with high-flying special effects, Crash and Burn feels like a tedious tax shelter picture. If you have a soft spot for movies featuring long, poorly lit scenes of people saying sci-fi jargon to one another in grimy industrial sub-basement sets, you'll love Crash and Burn. Otherwise, just watch Robot Jox again. That one at least has Yuzna and Gordon.
To its credit, Cannon beat Commando to the box office by a couple months and gave us a stoic one-man-army that cracked wise before he killed the nefarious forces of communism. But that's about all it has going for it. It's bigger and it's louder than most of the Cannon movies that came before it and I might start claiming it as my favorite Christmas movie while the rest of you continue to joke about Die Hard but as far as Chuck Norris movies go, the equally as cartoonish Delta Force is a vastly better movie.
Hardly a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, Adam Chaplin looks like it was shot on an iphone with about 10,000 gallons of fake blood, but it definitely achieves what it set out to do. They wanted to make an original live-action movie that has all the beats and characteristics of a wildly violent anime and with fun and goofy special effects and creative editing they manage to pull it off. While it won't go down in history with titles like Story of Ricky, it's definitely a worthy attempt and a fun watch.
Utterly bizarre, Messiah of Evil feels like Jean Rollin adapting an unpublished work by HP Lovecraft. Its tone alternates between spooky and incompetent like the pendulum on a grandfather clock and at times feels like either Carnival of Souls, being legitimately atmospheric and spooky and Manos the Hands of Fate, feeling like a stifling nightmare of a person that has no business making movies. It's no wonder that the couple which produced it went on to make Howard The Duck. Definitely worth your time, but temper your expectations. It dares you to shut it off and watch something else before pulling you back in.
Can a polizziotesco be so macho that it's gay? Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man seeks to answer that question with its bromance buddies, Alfredo and Antonio, two killing machines that are a bigger danger to Italian society than the gangsters they lay low in practically every scene. They go hard at every woman they come across to a point that it's ridiculous and they live like Bert and Ernie. They might be a little less violent if they just stopped denying their feelings for one another and explored.
Quite possible the most memorable and most-dishonest movie poster of the 80's, Def-Con 4 (which was actually NORAD's code for peacetime conditions) is way better than it has any right to be and makes me wish that Trakt had rating designations like "fun". Italy ruled the 80's post-nuke exploitation scene but this one, from Canada, gives them a run for their money. It very much feels like a precursor to the low-budget good times that Astron-6 would make a couple decades later.
Exceptionally difficult to find, the bulk of the movie is clumsy and definitely feels like a film made by someone who had never done it before. But if there's one reason to watch it, it's that the 40-something minute chase scene that makes up the bulk of the movie is vastly better than most properly-budgeted action movies.
For a movie that lands right around the 90-minute mark, it feels far, far longer. Nothing happens for long stretches of time and D'Amato's direction to his cast, with the exception of Eastman, must have been little more than "pretend you're suffering from a traumatic head wound" because they all stumble around the set like livestock. Punctuated by a couple scenes of genuinely "can't believe they really did that" gore scenes, Anthropophagus is a movie for horror movie completists.
You can see the twist coming a mile away and that's alright. But how this movie manages to slip under the radar of HP Lovecraft fans is a mystery to me.
Not sure what I was expecting to find here but it sure wasn't that. It's a mind-bending concept that, at the very least, is original but a little too convoluted for its own good.
Somehow way gorier than its predecessor and just as funny but the Dr. Hill storyline is more or less forgotten until it's time to end the movie. They could have cut that subplot, entirely, ended the movie with the fate of Dr. West's "creation" and the movie would have been just as enjoyable. Nicotero and Screaming Mad George FX are outstanding.
An utterly disjointed attempt to mash up Cannibal Holocaust with Heart of Darkness. I'm sure it felt way more relevant when the People's Temple massacre was still fresh in people's minds. Definitely worth the watch, though. Deodato had a bit more money than he was used to and while I'm sure quite a bit of it went up his nose, he still managed to put some nasty, very creative gore on the screen.
Extremely hard to come by and an extraordinarily strange riff on vampire movies.
