Just some advice: If your entire movie’s existence is centered on the fact that you’re an off brand Transformers, it’s a good idea to show us some transforming robots every now and then. After sixteen years (!), Asylum finally scrounged up enough to deliver a sequel to their first high profile mockbuster series “Transmorphers.” They offer us their answer to “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” If you didn’t like the “Rise of the Beasts,” odds are you might enjoy “Mech Beasts”—if you’re a fan of actors staring off screen and describing robots rather than ever showing them, of course.
Tag Archives: Thriller
Leave the World Behind (2023)
“Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard–coated bastards with a bastard filling.” – Scrubs
Director Sam Esmail’s “Leave the World Behind” is a mean, nasty, and cynical apocalyptic parable that stages the quintessential end of the world scenario but also takes a magnifying glass to humanity and the inherent paranoia that transforms a scenario from working together to survive, to survival of the fittest. While some of the symbolism is a bit clunky in some spots, “Leave the World Behind” is a very volatile and relevant take on how we’re more likely to pick at each other’s bones and fight for scraps when resources become finite. While that does feel like old hat post apocalyptic fodder, “Leave the World Behind” is refreshingly complex and quite horrifying.
You Have to See This! Shredder Orpheus (1989)
Now Available at Vinegar Syndrome.
The best way to summarize “Shredder Orpheus” is if “Gleaming the Cube” and “Videodrome” had a torrid violent, sexual love affair while high on shrooms that projected new wave music videos in to their brains, all the while the pair ended their rendezvous with a round of skateboarding. Courtesy of Boom! Cult and AGFA, Robert McGinley’s VHS SOV genre film is simultaneously oddly entertaining but also incredibly mind numbing. It’s a dystopian tale that seems to be working toward some kind of coherency at times, but occasionally gives up in exchange of using the budget to showcase skateboarding. In lieu of story there are just aimless scenes of people skateboarding.
There’s Something In The Barn (2023)
One of the aspects that hinders Magnus Marten’s “There’s Something in the Barn” from being a real home run of a movie is that it never quite decides what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s a horror movie, sometimes it is fantasy, sometimes it’s just downright comedy, and it builds up this intricate universe with not a lot of explanation or extrapolation. “There’s Something in the Barn” could be good. It could be “Krampus” good, but it leans so much toward this fish out of water comedy that it loses sight of the whole premise involving killer elves, and this weird pact that is never fully explored or fleshed out.
Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996): Arrow Video Limited Edition [4K UHD]
1990’s “Tremors” and I go a long way. It’s not just one of my all time favorite monster movies, but it’s also a childhood favorite and has a ton of nostalgic value. I first started watching it when my mom recorded it on VHS off of cable TV back in the heyday of the 1990’s. I wore that VHS out, suffice to say. I loved it and still love it. So imagine my surprise when in 1996, in came “Tremors 2: Aftershocks.” While this follow up is not at all like the original film it still manages to be pretty darn fun.
Nightmare on 34th Street (2023)
Like clockwork every year a studio releases a Christmas themed anthology for the masses, and almost always it’s a big letdown. It’s not really enough to inject the whole Christmas aesthetic. A genuinely scary story helps, too. “Nightmare on 34th Street” is a rambling, often nonsensical, unscary Christmas anthology movie that is literally all over the place. It re-uses actors, garners a whole cast that spend their time obviously reading from cue cards off screen, and director Crow doubles down a shoddy editing job that makes his film more confusing and jarring than scary.
The Marvels (2023)
What hinders Nia DaCosta’s “The Marvels” is that it literally is all over the place. This feels like Marvel is trying to squeeze in so much in ninety minutes, and while often it succeeds in getting the idea across, it can also stumble here and there. Nonetheless, “The Marvels” still winds up being a bang up Marvel entry, one that’s packed with some excellent fight sequences, wonderful conflict, and a great trio of characters, all of whom present a common goal in spite of how they operate as superheroes. Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeua and Kamala Khan are all heroes in their own right approaching the ideas of the superhero in their own mind set.