After the very entertaining “Power Rangers” tribute “Super Task Force One,” I like where director Steve Rudzinski’s head is. He seems interested in delivering audiences good old fashioned genre entertainment, and he has the talent to back up the ambition. Even with the obvious rock bottom budgets, he can churn out some amusing and charming indie films. If he’s ever given a huge budget, I think he could blow audiences out of the water.
If there’s one really negative criticism I can lobby at “Daniel” is that it feels more like a prologue to a larger film, than a short film. And I’d love to see Peter Dukes create the long form narrative to this shot film someday. “Daniel” is a very good and creepy short film that centers on its big hook, and once it comes, it’s tough to forget.
One of the hallmarks of my youth in the nineties, “How I Spent My Vacation” was the credit Tiny Toons finally got, even if it was just on home video. That was okay, since the real fans of the series could take home their favorite Tiny Toon pals and re-visit their wacky summer time and time again. I must have seen “How I Spent My Vacation” a hundred times on VHS, and thankfully (much like the series) the movie holds up surprisingly well, and is still very funny. “How I Spent My Vacation” follows the group from “Tiny Toon Adventures” as they all are pulled in various directions for their summer vacations.
One of the aspects of “Isa” that I enjoyed beyond the predominantly latino cast, is the fact that its heroine “Isa” is a strong individual. When we first meet her, she’s a brilliant tech wiz who sells jail breaking cards on the side for extra cash. She always seems one step ahead of everyone, even at her most vulnerable, and uses a troubling dilemma as an opportunity to find out about her shady past. She has memories of parents she barely knew, and is living a life she doesn’t quite trust to be her actual one, and she’s capable of finding out and giving the villains of the film a damn hard time working around her brain.
Goofy, albeit erotic, “Same Time Every Year” is one of the more tightly directed and entertaining smut films from the late seventies, that would help usher in the eighties porn wave. It’s not really a movie so much as it is hardcore porn, but it definitely has its charms. Besides the gorgeous women and well edited sex scenes, “Same Time Every Year” is delightfully funny at times. Whether it’s intentional or not, I’m not sure, but some scenes were just too unusual to take as erotic.
Joseph Zito’s 1984 treatment of “Friday the 13th” really should have been the final film in the series. While I do love the “Friday the 13th” movie series dearly, there’s a considerable drop off in quality after “The Final Chapter” as you can sense the writers trying to bring Jason back with as little absurdity as possible. “The Final Chapter” is one of the last really excellent horror romps that focus on character dynamic and family, and surely enough it’s still a very strong horror film where Jason Voorhees is an unstoppable killing machine.
It definitely feels like someone took the original short story of the monkey’s paw, and stretched in to ninety minutes of melodrama. There’s so much padding and filler here, you could cut it down to fifty minutes without missing much. “The Monkey’s Paw” is one in dozens of variations of the dreaded monkey’s paw tale, created by W.W. Jacobs (about the perfect wish trinket with dire consequences). Except the monkey’s paw bears little to no relevance in a movie about an undead guy who just wants to take his young son fishing. He just wants to take him fishing, what’s a dead guy to do? Kill a lot of boring supporting characters to get his wish?