235. Premium Rush (2012)

May 20, 2014

This was my second time watching Premium Rush. The first time I watched it I wasn't really interested in seeing it and then I was blown away by how much fun it was. This time I think I over-hyped it in my head and definitely didn't get the same enjoyment as before. I still loved Michael Shannon's over the top performance as the crooked cop with a gambling problem. The movie follows Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a bike messenger, as he tries to get a package from one side of the city to another while Shannon is constantly trying to take the package away from him to settle his gambling debts. It is entertaining, but I feel like maybe I just wasn't in the mood this time around.

234. 'Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice (1988)

May 18, 2014

Released 14 years after 'Gator Bait, 'Gator Bait II: Cajun Justice just couldn't quite muster the charm that the first one had. It was watchable, but a little disappointing in comparison. This one started with the brother from the first movie (the one who didn't have a tongue and couldn't speak) getting married to a city girl out in the swamps. Well, in this movie he spoke just fine, and there was no mention of the fact that he couldn't before. So we press on and forget about that. While on their honeymoon, one of the bad guys who died in the first movie came back to get the new bride and rape her with his new gang of idiots. They sort of tried to explain how he was still alive, but I wasn't buying it. So now we've got two glaring inconsistencies and I'm starting to wonder if the people who made both movies ever bothered to watch the first one to see what happened in it before making a sequel. But again, we press on. This is where the action heats up. The husband gets shot and left for the alligators to eat, and the wife gets kidnapped. When one of her captors shows the tiniest sign of having a conscience and helps her escape, she quickly learns the swamp skills necessary to survive not only in the wild but also while being pursued by a mob of merciless imbeciles. I'd call it worth watching once to say you've seen it, but only after you've seen the first movie.

233. 'Gator Bait (1974)

May 18, 2014

Starring the beautiful Claudia Jennings (Unholy Rollers) who tragically passed away at the far too young age of 29, 'Gator Bait was a lot of fun. It was the kind of movie that shouldn't have been good but was actually really entertaining. Jennings played a young woman living in the Louisiana swamps, where she hunted gators and snakes and took care of her little brother and sister. When one of the local deputies and his buddy went out to the swamp to try to rape her, she threw a bag of snakes at them and the deputy accidentally shot his buddy. Of course, he blamed it on Jennings, which started a swamp-wide manhunt with the Sheriff, his son the Deputy, and the father and two brothers of the guy who got shot. Outsmarted by Jennings at every turn, they eventually found her cabin and took the brother and sister hostage. Things went south, as they do, and the sister ended up getting murdered while they were trying to rape her. The brother got away (they weren't as worried about him since he didn't have a tongue and couldn't tell anyone anything), and when Jennings found out about what they did to her sister she didn't feel so bad about killing the rest of the rednecks that were chasing her. It was a pretty awesome movie.

232. Ghost Story (1981)

May 17, 2014

My friend Patrick was shocked that I had never seen Ghost Story, and I don't like to disappoint my friends, so I gave it a watch. He was right when he said it was a great movie. It featured four old men in a secret club where they told each other ghost stories. The problem for them was the scariest ghost story was the real life one they were about to be part of. When one of the old men's son died under bizarre circumstances, his other son came home to stay with him for a while. That son more or less forced his way into the club and learned of a long-kept secret that the old men had shared for many years, involving a young woman they accidentally killed and then disposed of. Turned out the young woman had become a vengeful spirit and was back for blood. With a guilty conscience and a will to survive, the old men and their newest club member set out to make right what they had done and try not to get killed in the process. It was a well told story with superb acting and creepy atmosphere.

231. Neon Maniacs (1986)

May 17, 2014

I don't really know what it was about Neon Maniacs, but I loved it so much. I can't stop thinking about how awesome it was. The plot was silly and the acting wasn't great, but something about it really made an impression on me. The Neon Maniacs were the homicidal Village People of the monster community. A group of 12 subhumanoid monster-types each with very individual characteristics - one was a doctor, another was a biker, another was a neanderthal, and so on. By night they terrorized and mutilated the teens of San Francisco and by day they hibernated inside the Golden Gate Bridge. It was up to a monster-obsessed girl who dreamed of making horror movies to find a way to stop the maniacs. She figured out the way and considering where the maniacs lived it was a really silly way (they were deathly allergic to water but they lived under a bridge). Anyway, despite any short-comings the plot may have had, I genuinely loved this movie more than I can put down in words.

230. Lurkers (1988)

May 17, 2014

In this creepy little film, ten year old Cathy is haunted by spirits that come out of the walls at night and reach out for her. Cathy's mother kills her father and tries to kill her but she escapes. Several years later Cathy has a new boyfriend and life seems to be going pretty well for her even though she still has some visions and a brother who blames her for the deaths of their parents. Her boyfriend invites her to a party at his new office which happens to be the same building that Cathy grew up in. She refuses to go inside and ends up witnessing a murder and getting chased around the block until she is forced to go back into the old building. When she gets to the party things go even further downhill, and she finds out that the building she grew up in is a gateway to hell. She also finds out that there are many gateways to hell around the world and that is where all the bad people are born. The party guests then turn into the lurkers who haunted her as a child and try to drag her down with them. I thought the film was excellent, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes watching obscure but classy horror films.

229. Godzilla (2014)

May 16, 2014

I liked the new Godzilla. We saw it at the drive-in, and there really isn't a better way to see a Godzilla movie. For CGI monsters, the effects were pretty good. It started with a mysterious explosion in Japan 15 years ago that devastated a small community and sent scientist Bryan Cranston into a frenzy to figure out what happened. Cut to the present and the signs were there that it was going to happen again. Cranston's son, Aaron Taylor-Johnson had to go to Japan to get Cranston out of jail for trespassing on government property and the two of them started working together to figure out what was going on. It was about this point when the movie became a monster movie and two giant monsters showed up. Then Godzilla showed up as well and the monsters started fighting and it was awesome. Ken Watanabe played an oddly intuitive scientist that for no explained reason seemed to know what the monsters were doing any why. I thought it was a lot of fun though. Much better than the 1998 Godzilla, which wasn't hard to beat.

228. The Undertaker (1988)

May 15, 2014

Sadly, The Undertaker was the last feature film to star the great Joe Spinell. It isn't a good movie. It was funny in a sort of unintentional way since the acting was so abysmal. The opening credits continually switched between a bunch of ladies working out and a purposefully pixelated rock concert. The concert had nothing to do with the plot, but the ladies did. Some of them got naked, and some of them didn't. One of them had an uncle (Joe Spinell) who was in the funeral business and business of late was not so good. So to drum up new business and to have fresh, young, female corpses to allegedly sleep with, he started killing young women. Not in the ultra creepy Maniac style, but in a more off-camera, boring style. Regardless, we push on because this is Joe Spinell's last feature film, right? Eventually the cops set their sites on Spinell and start investigating him. There really isn't a whole lot to talk about with this movie. The plot, acting, budget, and all other technical aspects are virtually non-existent, so we're left with only one reason to give this movie a second thought and I've already said it twice.

227. Son of Dracula (1974)

May 15, 2014

Son of Dracula was an over-ambitious and overly silly novelty film starring Ringo Starr as Merlin, and Harry Nilsson as the titular son of Dracula, Count Downe. Count Downe was supposed to be crowned the king of the netherworld or prince of darkness or something along those lines, but ended up vying with Baron Frankenstein for the title. The problem was the count never really wanted the title, he just wanted to play music and sleep with his human girlfriend, but Baron Frankenstein was so nefarious that the powers that be, namely Merlin, had to make sure the count was crowned. As convoluted as that whole story was, they decided to throw in to the mix all sorts of other creatures, from werewolves and wax people to mummies and other various ghouls. If they had been able to pick a direction and stick to it, I might have enjoyed the film more. As it was, the 90 minute run time felt like an eternity with no focus or clarity to keep me interested.

226. The Psychopath (1973)

May 14, 2014

The Psychopath was fantastic! It was a super creepy look into the life of a children's television host with a knack for finding children who had been abused, neglected, or molested, and a penchant for killing the parents who did it. As honorable as that may be, the killer was creepy enough in his own way too. He talked to his puppets and killed someone with a lawn mower and after killing one kid's parents he played piano and cried. It was a disturbing film and I absolutely loved it! I watched it on YouTube, but if I can track down a decent copy I will.