Red Dawn (1984)

Director John Milius’s 1984 war action film “Red Dawn” is probably one of the best guilty pleasures the eighties ever doled out for audiences. It’s certainly one of my childhood favorites, a film I recall re-watching time and time again and cheering on the likes of Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze. The film as a whole is absurd and incredibly silly, with everything in the film being drawn as inexplicably convenient for the good guys, and incredibly bad for the bad guys. Trained mercenaries can’t possibly outwit and outgun a bunch of high school students whose only training is hunting in the woods? Seriously?

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Red Dawn (2012)

The tale of “Red Dawn” was always nothing but a Reagan era fantasy film to begin with, so the remake of the 1984 action film wasn’t going to be looked upon as anything but fiction pure and simple. It’s a shame that director Dan Bradley’s remake of “Red Dawn” was shelved for a very long time. All things considered, while it does have its inherent flaws, it proves to be much better than the original. The element that Director Bradley improves upon is turning the Wolverines less in to overnight commandoes, and more in to human beings fighting for a cause that may spell doom for them if they’re not careful. And it does this by turning the conflict over on its head and turning the Wolverines in to a terrorist group that is operating underground.

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Street Sharks – The Complete Series (DVD)

006It just goes to show that just because something is cool on paper, it doesn’t mean it’ll be scooped up by children. By 1994, pretty much every studio were looking for their own “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” take off that could grant them instant success. Since the eighties and most of the nineties belonged ot the heroes in a halfshell, most of the animated studios looked for their own spin on the formula. There were at least dozen clones of the Ninja Turtles once the Ninja Turtles took off. One of them was “Street Sharks.”

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Godzilla (1998)

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You have to hand it to Roland Emmerich, his marketing for 1998’s “Godzilla” was fantastic. Before “Cloverfield” enforced not showing the monster until you had your butt planted in seats in theaters, Emmerich and Tristar applied the same marketing with just as much mystery. I fondly recall many of the early trailers for “Godzilla” being packed with questions about what the beast looked like rebooted. Hell, in 1997, I bought the movie book that explored the making of “Godzilla,” and there wasn’t a single picture in the book that gave a clear picture of the new Godzilla.

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You Have to See This! Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Russ Meyer was a man who loved breasts. He surely enjoyed the female form, but mostly he loved breasts. He fetishized them, worshipped them, and centered his entire career making films that idolized them in some form or another. Russ Meyer is one of the last directors who cast and adored curvy busty women, and though he’s written off sometimes as an exploitation director, Meyer definitely was a dying breed of male. Sure, breasts are still worshipped in today’s society, but not many directors have the guts to reveal them so much in their films.

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Our Top Ten Comic Book Movies

The comic book movie has never been bigger in the age of modern cinema, and as a commodity, it’s still a very valuable asset for many studios who once considered the notion of basing a tent pole movie around a superhero laughable. For a long time comic book movies were C grade Television fodder like “Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD” and “Generation X,” and now they’re raking in humongous profits at the box office, have helped fuel media empires, saved comic book companies like Marvel, and have attracted humongous movie stars to portray iconic characters. As such with comic book movies still being doled out in as fast a pace as studios can dole them out, here are ten of my Top Ten Comic Book Movies of All Time. So far. I expect this list to be different in ten years.

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Spiders (2013)

spidersYou know how I know “Spiders” is set in New York and not in a cleverly shot in a studio with the same set pieces re-used over and over again? Becawse Patrick Muldoon tawks like dis tru most of da movie. Youse guys and yaw clichés about New Yawkers! Hey, I’m walkin here! It sounds like I made a bad funny, but a character actually shouts that a half hour in to the movie. Because it’s not Canada if you don’t say “eh,” and it’s not New York if you don’t pay homage to Ratzo Rizzo.

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