“But I got a mantis in my pantis.” – MST3K
Nathan Juran’s “The Deadly Mantis” is the antithesis of every single monster movie ever made. It’s aggressively boring, tedious, and doesn’t even have any kind of camp to compensate for the obvious lack of the monster. Even worse, at almost eighty minutes in length, the monster never actually rears its face on camera until about twenty five minutes in. The rest is stock footage, stock footage, and even more stock footage!
I’ve always been and will continue to be a staunch defender of John Carpenter. He’s one of my all time favorite filmmakers and even his weakest outputs have some great creativity to them. “Vampires” is fun in all its schlocky nonsense, and “Ghosts of Mars” is a fun remake of “Assault on Precinct 13” for a contemporary audience. Eighteen years later, “Ghosts of Mars” is fine C grade science fiction redeemed by Carpenter’s sharp direction, and the absolutely gorgeous Natasha Henstridge.
Nostalgia entertainment is about as popular as ever and modern streaming services and networks are banking on the fascinating topics that can be mined from the mementos of pop culture. One of the most entertaining documentary series to be brought to the popular Netflix service has been by Brian Volk-Weiss’s “The Toys That Made Us.” While most studios would cut corners by merely making a series that relies on “Remember this?” and “Remember when…?” what “The Toys That Made Us” instead does is examine the importance and relevance of iconic toy lines from the eighties and nineties.
I remember not enjoying “Man’s Best Friend” too much back in 1993, and in 2019, it hasn’t aged very well at all. Unless you have a fancy for nineties horror with rock bottom expectations, John Lafia’s killer dog movie is a movie that’s confused in both tone and genre, quite often. I had a tough time developing the emotions during this experience, because nothing is ever really clarified for the audience. Is this a dark comedy or a horror film? Should we loathe Max or sympathize with Max? Is he the film’s villain, an anti-hero, or the victim of circumstances like Cujo?
Mill Creek Entertainment continues to unleash their vast library of exploitation titles, and they’ve continued running down the more obscure and lesser known blaxploitation titles. While other companies are giving us stuff like “Coffy” and “Cleopatra Jones,” Mill Creek Entertainment is offering up other interesting titles for pretty good savings for the collector looking to save a buck or two.
“Never-Ending Man” is a meaningful documentary that explores the thoughts and ideas of Hayao Miyazaki that we can’t really find anywhere else. While some may go in to this expecting a more biographical and fluffy film about the man and his life, Kaku Arakawa seeks to give us more of a thoughtful and subtler peek in to the man, who is late in to his career and his life.
Directors Gustavo Steinberg, André Catoto, and Gabriel Bitar deliver an interesting and original animated adventure with “Tito and the Birds” that’s based around very relevant social and political themes. Audiences will find some fascinating messages to be mined from “Tito and the Birds,” as the writers explore the idea of prejudice and hate the potential for disease and misery to be exploited by fascism and greed.