Rambo Is Legend

I confess to having watched Rambo (IV) last night, on opening night. Couldn’t have been more fun. Years ago (mid 80s) I watched Rocky IV and Rambo II at a local cinema, with American childhood friends of mine. The cinema was packed and during the action people shouted a cheered (and during the Rocky showdown, stood on their seats screaming and waving their arms in the air).

Last night was similar. Packed cinema, and opening logos someone shouted “Gee, I’m SO excited”, to which the audience laughed and clapped. They clapped and cheered during some of the more extraordinary deaths and mutilations, and to Rambo’s classic line (which I feel free to spoil as it’s in the trailer): “you live for nothing, or die for something”.

It’s a brutal, brutish film; demonstrating US idiocy in terms of both military aggression and fundamentalist Christian zeal. On the other hand I’ve never seen so many people exploded in such a short length of time. Not only does it star Stallone, it’s directed by him and co-written by him (with Art Monterastelli, writer/producer of Total Recall 2070).

But it could have been so different. Consider the alternative ending to the first Rambo movie (unlike it’s successors, an anti-war movie) First Blood:

GCGC

Met with the societies coordinator today with the view to starting a gaming society, possibly Glasgow Caledonian Gaming Club as GCGC is one of the less clunkier monikers. Had a useful meeting of requirements and facilities, they’ll give a a hundred quid or so to get a few choice games into the society to kick it off, and provide a nice space on a weekly basis. The planning, constitution, advertising and the rest should take 3-4 weeks, after which it should be up and running.

Have tickets to see Control, the Ian Curtis/Joy Division story, this Friday at the extravagant Grosvenor.

Sunshine – Stupidest Movie Ever

Blurt Alert: if you haven’t seen Sunshine yet, and want to, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

The film is deeply stupid, possibly one of the worst ever science-fiction movies, one that doesn’t even have the benefit of being hilariously bad. It’s just stupid. Not the concept, that’s fine. They wanted to make a global warming film, they turn it around by having that global cooling, and an irony of fixing global cooling is they have to fly to the sun, turning the film warm again. That’s fine. That humans could build a nuclear bomb that would re-ignite the sun, fine. No, really, I don’t mind that at all, that’s all part of high-concept, no worries. Here’s the plot: Icarus 2 flies to the sun, finds a drifting Icarus 1 on the way. The crew of the Icrarus 2 decided to take a detour to visit Icarus 1. They don’t check their calculations, leaving them to one guy, an expert, who apparently forgets to rotate the craft as well as fly it. Stupid. Stupid they’d fly off-course. Stupid they’d leave it to one guy to navigate (as everyone else minces around the holodeck pontificating). Stupid he’d get something so basic so wrong. So the flying off-course damages the ship, dooming them all. They get to the drifting ship and they board it without security precautions so a crispy lunatic from the first mission comes aboard and bumps them all off one-by-one in the style of Friday the 13th Part VI.

The stupidness of the movie exists only to pad-out an otherwise inexistent movie. Without being stupid, and without lots of button pushing and average special effects shots of the sun, this movie would struggle to make the length of a Fast Show sketch.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. A monster-movie in space, without good monsters. Grrr.

300 Fuzz Riders

Been on a cinema binge recently. Hot Fuzz was good fun. By the makers of Shaun of the Dead, similar to it, and not quite as good. Fine on a first watch, I suspect it doesn’t have anything like the repeatability of Shaun. Ghost Rider was very silly, even for comic book films. It’s also not bad, as long as your definition of “not bad” includes Satan’s (literally) flaming Harley burning up the side of a skyscraper. It has plot holes large enough to produce gravitational fields, and Nick Cage plays Nick Cage’s Nick Cage, but worth a watch if you’re a boy or a tomboy. Spinal Tap (1985) played my local poseur (sorry, art) cinema as part of a comedy festival. The venue has an extraordinarily pleasant auditorium, and an impossibly cool bar – you expect at any moment to see cameras filming a million-dollar Bacardi advert. Was amazing to see Tap (again), and in such a luxurious setting. I’m destined to see Musclequeens of Sparta, sorry, Frank Miller’s 300. Sure I like Gladiator movies, Conan movies even more, that doesn’t prove a thing! And I’ve had respect for director Znak Snider’s agreement with Universal to remake Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Every other director on earth would have refused out of honour, out of principle, out of respect for the dead. I mean Romero. Snider made it anyway, and he made it one a hell of a trip. If he does for Thermopylae what he did for the slow blue shuffling genre, I’ll be delighted.

Flesh Flowers

On Saturday I got the opportunity to attend the Glasgow Film Theatre’s five-film horror mini-festival, Fright Fest.

The Tripper, directed by David Arquette. An amusing pastiche of 70s low-budget guerrilla “nobody ever lost any money taking a bunch of teenagers to the woods an chopping them up” films. The teenagers/20 somethings are students/drop-outs on a drug-taking weekend at a music festival, a wild party spoilt by a Ronald Reagan kill-all-hippies chainsaw/axe nutter in the woods. Nice to see Jason Mewes, Jay of Jay and Silent Bob fame, playing himself again, and it’s not often you get to see Candy Flipping – the taking of LSD and ecstasy – onscreen very often these days. A great start to the day.

S&Man is a “documentary” on “underground horror” by J. T. Petty, who described himself as a maker of underground horror. His IMDb citation has his one low-budget horror (Soft for Digging, 2001) but all of his subsequent work as been writing credits on video games, notably after Tom Clancy gives an “idea” for the next title in his franchise, Petty then does the actual writing. His documentary focused on three production companies who, at best, can best be described as “completely and utterly perverted and demented”. Toetag Pictures and Bill Zebub Productions have the common thread of depicting the graphic torture, rape, and murder of women – though not necessarily in that order. “Hey! You shot me in the crotch”. No, really. The eponymous S&Man Productions of the title is a lone-man who follows women with a video camera (allegedly without them knowing), then approaching them to be in one of his movies. If they say yes he stalks them for a bit more, then takes them into a location and pretends to murder them, through strangulation, stabbing, the entire range. Charming. Except is it? Presenting itself as a documentary S&Man looked at this Eric Rost, living in his mother’s basement, making his demented movies. Except it’s not true. Eric Rost doesn’t exist, nor do his movies, and his website is a MySpace stunt by the director. Eric Rost is played by the actor/comedian Erik Marcisak. This was only known in retrospect. Was Petty’s goal situationist, or is he simply an opportunist liar? I objected to Petty’s assertion these were “horror” films and not pornography. Petty justifies his assertion on the grounds these films don’t feature penetrative sex. That’s a pisspoor criteria. The notable thread of all the films discussed was grotesque sexual violence, the only people who’d want to persue these fims (the ones that do exist) are men with violent sexual fantasies. That’s it. The entire market. Toetag and Bill Zebub produce rape porn. It’s as simple as that. I don’t feel a five-film Horror Film Festival really needs a documentary on nonces, let alone a part-Day Today part-Dispatches film on pretend nonces.

The Messengers, by Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, sometimes known as the Pang Brothers. A pair of Hong Kong horror legends their first Hollywood film is, in a word, dull. In more words, dull, obvious, clichéd, slow, uninteresting, and with special effects that would make Ray Harryhausen turn in his grave – and he’s not even dead. Boring. Worthless. Avoid.

Turista, to be re-titled Paradise Lost, follows a bunch of whiney white tourists stranded in Darkest Brazil with only pocket-robbing locals and industrious organ thieves. The film has been critically panned, though I’m not sure it was a bad as the reviewers have made out, I certainly felt uneasy about casting basically every brown person in Brazil as in on a grand conspiracy to rob gringos, the film’s message explicitly stated to not take the bus anywhere in Latin America but to fly between metropolises. But some great locations and lots of tension. Watch it for free if you get the chance.

Motel Hell, 1980. A bone-fide old-school classic. Directed by Kevin Connor, who went on to have a modest career directing TV shows like Hart to Hart and Remmington Steele. Written by Robert Jaffe (who also wrote the disturbing Demon Seed), Steven-Charles Jaffe, (helped produce Near Dark, The Fly II, Strange Days, Star Trek VI, and, strangely, Ghost), with an uncredited writing contribution by Tim Tuchrello (a respected sound producer, recently sound-editing Apocalypto). This film could not be crazier, less-likely, more more-fun. What’s the secret meat in Farmer Smith’s special smoked meat? Human flesh, silly! This is the most lunatic, light-hearted, take on Psycho or Texas Chainsaw Killer you could hope for. Best part? I couldn’t choose between a pigtailed Nancy Parsons (the big gym-teacher from Porky’s), Farmer Smith wondering in a Southern drawl about the “karmic implications of all of this”, and the rows and rows of victims, buried up to the necks with vocal chords severed. They were like rows of gargling cabbages. Nasty, sure, but played for fun the whole film through. The gloriously dead-pan double entendres “don’t worry, my dear, one day I’ll teach you to smoke meat” had the audience in stitches. A brilliant finale.