Fortunate for me that I was born from parents who bought literally every VHS movie they could get their hands on in the heyday of the eighties. Fortunate for me that I was born from a woman who loves every horror movie ever made, and continues to love every horror movie ever made. Which is where my meeting with “The Dark” enters. Available on DVD and still pretty rare, “The Dark” is one of the most confusing hybrids of blaxploitation, science fiction, and horror I’ve ever seen with ambiguous plot devices, horrific performances, and the odd association with Dick Clark. Watching this on the same grainy discount VHS from Media Home Entertainment I first viewed it on fourteen years ago, “The Dark” has lost plenty of the oompf and suspense I remember it holding.
Category Archives: Grindhouse Review Fest
The Devil Inside Her (1977)
See, here is what I hate in porn: Artsy fartsy. Whenever a porno director convinces himself that he’s going to make something other than another stag movie and tries his hand at arthouse, it’s really annoying. Case in point: “The Devil Inside Her,” a mixture of Andy Warhol, Merchant-Ivory, and “The Crucible,” Zebedy Colt attempts an actual story in an hour, and fails with laughable results. To call this a pure monstrosity is an under statement, as every bit of direction and dialogue is painful, while even the hardcore porn is reduced to satire that fails to be even the slightest bit arousing.
Amateur Porn Star Killer 2: The Snuff Version (2008) (DVD)
There’s a distinct difference between Shane Ryan’s movie version of “APSK 2” and his snuff version. One version is a safe and pretty clear fictional mock documentary chronicling Brandon and his ever devious quest to punish women. The other version, the snuff version, has much more balls. This is Shane Ryan’s original vision and more importantly, this is the actual director’s cut that dares to be much edgier and dynamic with its premise. While I completely understand the inevitable hot water Ryan would have gotten in to if he’d continued to pull the “fact or fiction?” gimmick with his “Amateur Porn Star Killer” movies, I really think in the end, it took something away. The constant reminders that this is fiction pretty much ruin any hopes of being sucked into the narrative. Sequels are hardly ever really good and frankly, there doesn’t seem to be a need for another from the Alter Ego flagship series, but “Amateur Porn Star Killer 2” is thankfully good enough where you can put your reservations aside to enjoy what Ryan puts on the table for us.
Re-Animator (1985)
Rake me over the coals all you want, but up until today, I have never seen “Re-Animator.” Shocked? You probably are. But the legendary horror film that’s managed to spawn comic books, video games, sequels, fan fiction, and even cross overs with other horror icons (Cassie Hack, baby!) has just evaded me all of my life. When I was a kid I was not allowed to see this, and as a young adult I found it difficult to track it down. It’s just one of those film classics that I could never really get a hold of and watch. Watching “Re-Animator,” I can see what every horror geek raves about because even at over twenty years old, Stuart Gordon’s gory sickening classic hasn’t aged much at all.
42nd Street Blues: Waiting for the Second Revival
The “Grindhouse Review Fest” originally began back in 2007, when, to ring in the arrival of the much anticipated “Grind House,” we spent an entire month reviewing grindhouse flicks of old and new. And we had a blast. And so did our readers apparently, since the hits on Cinema Crazed jumped considerably around this period. So this year, we decided to do it again. With more movies, a small time crunch, and much better planning, we’ve gathered classic Grindhouse and Neo-Grindhouse from independent filmmakers, and brought to you the 2nd Annual Grindhouse Review Fest. And just to show you that we’re not fucking around with this occasion, we posed a survey to ourselves and to our gracious contributors to show that we absolutely adore grindhouse and all of its sub-genres from sexploitaiton, to nazisploitation. And we hope you love what contributors Lillian Patterson, William Garcia, and I, Felix Vasquez, have to say about Grindhouse movies, and why it’s one of our favorite hobbies as movie lovers.
The Abductors (1972)
Ginger: All play and no work makes Ginger a swinging chick.
Painted like a television show “The Abductors” is probably one of the dumbest attempts at a franchise I’ve ever seen. Beginning on a very dark note involving sexual slavery and kidnap, director Don Schain then suddenly drops into light comedy with Ginger and her boss acting as a James Bond and M partnership with subtle flirting, and some goofy dialogue that’s written in short hand and makes for some awfully laughable preamble to Ginger’s next adventure. Ginger this time is on the track of a sexual slavery crime ring, a group of vicious men who steal women off the streets, destroy their property and force them into acting as sexual escorts for millionaires at the threat of torture. Ginger in all her swinging metropolitan allure is called in to investigate and penetrate this syndicate with hopes of rescuing a girl. After all, it’s women’s lib, and Ginger is about to kick some manimal ass.
Ms. 45 (1981)
If there’s anything that gets my goat more than apocalypse films, and superhero films, it’s revenge flicks. Revenge movies make up some of the best cinema I’ve ever seen, from Samurai epics, to Western tales, and Abel Ferrera’s “Ms. 45” is that revenge movie in the vein of “I Spite on your Grave” where a woman who has suffered the crime of rape, now strikes out against all men, instead of the men who hurt her. Anna is a meek mute girl who designs clothes during the day time. On the way home, she’s anally raped on the street, and then staggers home wounded to find that a man has broken into her home and, angered that she has no valuables, decides to rape her… again.
Anna can’t catch a break, as you can imagine.