Directed by Chris Peckover, who wrote the script from a story by Zack Kahn, this film starts with 17-year-old babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla in Elvis) dealing with an awkward seduction by the five years younger Luke Lerner (Levi Miller). Then a brick flies through the window that says “U leave and U die” and it looks like someone has shot his friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould). That intruder breaks into the house with a shotgun as Ashley and Levi hide inside the closet.
And then…well, wouldn’t that be giving the whole movie away?
With cameos for Virginia Madsen and Patrick Warburton as Levi’s parents and enough twists and turns to fill twelve days of Christmas movies, Better Watch Out’s biggest surprise is that it was shot in Australia. Peckover was going to shoot this on a lower budget in North Carolina, but then Australian producer Brett Thornquest heard his mother was an Australian native and gave him $3 million to make it there.
My favorite idea in this movie is that the big city Ashley is moving to is Pittsburgh. What small town is she leaving?
Don’t read up on this movie. Just go into it cold, like I did, and get ready to discover if that paint can trick in Home Alone really would kill someone.
Written and directed by Thunder Levin, the writer of Sharknado, this movie has a dark matter asteroid crash into Earth and then unleash earthquakes all over the planet. This being a disaster film, that means that the real story is all about Johanna (Natalie Pelletier) and her two stepdaughters. There aren’t any stars to throw at this environmental hell on earth, so we must make due with what we have. That means family drama, Johanna trying to find her husband Matt (Matthew Pohlkamp) and also convince his son Rick (Erich Riegelmann) that she’s not trying to replace his dead mom.
What we have are electrical storms, some more groundshaking quakes, tidal waves and volcanos. In fact, everything happens in this movie and I’m shocked there wasn’t a famine or a bird attack.
In case you wonder, “What does the title mean?” I have the answer. This was the “We have Geostorm at home” for The Asylum. It came out 17 days before that movie.
Corey Alan directed a ton of TV, 1971’s The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio and this Rock Hudson-starring disasterpiece in which the much beloved actor plays ski resort owner David Shelby, a man who owns a ski lodge so we can all totoally identify with him. He also invites his ex-wife Caroline Brace (Mia Farrow!) to visit in the hopes that he can convince her that he’s a changed man.
His opposite is Nick Thorne (Robert Forster), an environmental photographer who knows that that David has built his resort where he shouldn’t. One look at the title of the movie should tell you what’s coming next. When Caroline battles Nick over being a control obsessed freak all over again, well, she ends up in Nick’s arms just in time for David’s business partner’s plane to crash into the mountain and send the snow into everyone’s lives.
The end of this movie — after so much destruction and loss of life — is really all about Mia Farrow choosing between Rock Hudson and Robert Forster. I mean, what else should this be about?
Originally budgeted at $6.5 million, producer Roger Corman cut that amount –will the shocks ever end? — before shooting began in Colorado. There’s plenty of styrofoam for snow, which is kind of obvious. It was still the most expensive movie that New World ever made.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Happy holidays to a movie that wants to ruin your season. This was first on the site on January 10, 2021.
This Aldo Lado-directed piece of Italian grime also went by the names Night Train Murders, The New House on The Left, Second House on The Left, Don’t Ride on Late Night Trains, Late Night Trains, Last House Part II and Xmas Massacre, depending on the whims of fate (and Hallmark Releasing).
Margaret (Irene Miracle, who was also in Midnight Express, Inferno and Puppet Master) and Lisa are set to take the night train from Germany to Italy, but the train is full and they have to sit in a long corridor. They help Blackie (Flavio Bucci, Suspiria) and Curly (Gianfranco De Grassi, The Church) hide from the ticket taker as they board the train and hide from the cops. Of course, instead of saying thanks, they end up decimating the two girls, along with the help of an upper class blonde (Macha Méril, Deep Red) who has already turned the tables on Blackie’s attempts at assaulting her by seducing him. The two thugs really have no idea what they’re in for, because this mysterious blonde is more dangerous than both of them put together.
The whole time the girls are being victimized, murdered and forced into suicide, Lisa’s parents are hosting a Christmas dinner party where her doctor father speaks on the ills of a more violent society.
Later, when they arrive at the station to get the girls, they are worried when they don’t arrive. If you wonder, “Will they end up taking the people that killed them home?” then yes, you have seen your share of revenge movies. The most shocking thing is that the blonde may be the only survivor of the evil trio, as her fate is left open.
This video nasty is the kind of movie that I don’t put on when people come to visit.
While some decry the bumbling cop comedy in Craven’s film, this one jettisons any attempt at levity, adds some 1975 Italian style, gets a soundtrack from Morricone and gets way, way dark.
Lado also made Short Night of Glass Dolls and Who Saw Her Die?, two of the more original and downbeat giallo to follow in the wake of Argento. Even when he’s ripping someone off — not that Craven didn’t also rip off The Virgin Spring, so there are no innocents here — he can’t help outdoing his competition.
Roland Emmerich is German for dumb movie, in case you don’t feel like looking that up on Google, and he based this movie on the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, two of the carniest people in the history of carnies and therefore, part of me loves this.
The world may fall to bits, CGI wolves may stalk the icy streets, but NOAA paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), his wife Dr. Lucy Hall (Sela Ward) and son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) are going to survive, right? Otherwise, everyone else is fair game.
Much like every disaster movie, Jack tries to warn Vice President Raymond Becker (Kenneth Walsh) to listen but it’s too late once that superstorm starts freezing everything in mere moments. Tokyo is hit with hail, the British royal family is stranded and Los Angeles is destroyed by tornadoes.
America has to move into Mexico, who at first closed their border, which is pretty funny. That said, it’s cool that a movie was made about climate change even if the science isn’t right. It’s something we should be talking about and working on, but you know, it’s not convenient and people would have to change how they do business and why should they care, right?
This movie has a 6.4 on IMDB. That’s the real problem.
John Guillermin didn’t shy away from big movies, directing King Kong, King Kong Lives, Skyjacked, Death On the Nile and this film, possibly the best regarded of all disaster movies. Based on The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, the screenplay was written by Stirling Silliphant, who created the series Route 66, Naked City and Perry Mason.
Architect Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) comes to San Francisco to see The Glass Tower, the building he designed for James Duncan (Willam Holden) be unveiled. It’s 138 stories but he worries that the electrical wiring is safe after a fire starts during testing. When he tells Duncan that his son-in-law and electrical subcontractor Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain) is doing bad work, it gets blown off. When Roberts takes Will Giddings (Norman Burton), the electrical engineer, to see what’s happening on the 81st floor, all hell breaks loose and the building starts to burn.
Meanwhile, chief of public relations Dan Bigelow (Robert Wagner) is throwing a party for Senator Gary Parker (Robert Vaughn) and refuses to stop the party, which ends up with all sorts of people trapped up on the roof and the fire lurching skyward.
Leave it to San Francisco Fire Department 5th Battalion Chief Michael O’Halloran (Steve McQueen) to save the day which, as always in these movies, involves using firehoses as makeshift elevator devices. Also, as always, many stars are thrown at the disaster, including Faye Dunaway as Roberts’ fiancee, Susan Blakely as Duncan’s daughter and Simmons’ wife, Fred Astaire as a conman, O.J. Simpson as a security guard, Dabney Coleman as a fire chief and even Bobby Brady shows up.
Here’s what’s really amazing about this and why there were two books used to make the movie. Warner Brothers had the rights to The Tower. Fox had The Glass Tower. Irwin Allen remembered when in the 60s, two studios both made movies about Jean Harlow and Oscar Wilde and everyone lost. He convinced executives at both Warner Bros. and Fox to join forces and make one movie. It cost $14,300,000 which is $86 million in today’s money. It made $203 million back or $1.2 billion today.
After two well-received web entries, 2003’s Rare Exports Inc. and 2005’s Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions, writer and director Jalmari Helander created this ode to the darker side of Santa Claus.
A British company called Subzero is doing arctic deep drilling when it discovers that a burial mound contains something hidden. Two boys, Juuso and Pietari listen in, then argue the existence of Santa before Pietari goes home to read how Santa is really a horned being who whips bad kids and boils them alive.
The day before Christmas Eve, Pietari’s dad, Rauno, digs a trap to protect his reindeer herd from wolves, who have been driven mad by the explosions and digging. They discover hundreds of dead reindeer, all gnawed to death, but both Pietari and his father are unsure if the wolves are really to blame.
Rauno blames his misfortune on the Subzero company and heads out for retribution. However, he finds no one there, just a deep pit into what looks like Hell. Then, they learn that potatoes, heaters and even a hairdryer have gone missing. Even worse, Jusso jas disappeared, a fact that Pietari discovers has happened to kids all over the village.
Another villager, Piiparinen, finds an old man who is near death, who goes from deceased to able to attack to strong enough to break metal bars. They dress the old man as Santa and inform Subzero’s American boss, Riley. He informs them that they only have an elf and must not behave rudely. One swear word later and the lights, Riley and his pilot have all been killed.
Everyone runs to Hangar 24, where they discover a horned beast trapped in a block of ice being warmed by the stolen heaters. They also see sacks of kidnapped children before they are attacked by the elves.
What follows is a daring rescue and escape, with Santa being blown up real good and Raulo ending up working with Subzero to send the elves to American malls, where they will be seasonal Santas.
Rare Exports could have been a silly parody of a film, but it is shot with dark charm and plenty of verve. It’s a really unique piece of cinema that surprised me at several turns.
Irwin Allen was the “Master of Disaster,” making this movie, The Towering Inferno, Flood!, Fire!, Hanging By a Thread, The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and When Time Ran Out. When he was asked if he’d ever run out of disasters, he said “No, I’m not going to run out of disasters. Pick up the daily newspaper, which is my best source for crisis stories, and you’ll find 10 or 15 every day. People chase fire engines, flock to car crashes. People thrive on tragedy. It’s unfortunate, but in my case, it’s fortunate. The bigger the tragedy, the bigger the audience.”
Based on The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico, this was directed by Ronald Neame (who also made Meteor) and written by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes, the movie starts with establishing that the SS Poseidon is not a seaworthy ship. Captain Harrison (Leslie Nielsen) tries to tell the owners and is instead told to just sail faster.
That’s when we get to meet the characters over dinner. There’s Detective Lieutenant Mike Rogo (Ernest Borgnine) and wife Linda (Stella Stevens) who he saved from the streets. Susan (Pamela Sue Martin) and Robin (Eric Shea) who are on their way to see their parents. Reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman), who is being punished by the church for his strange views on God only helping those who help themselves. Jewish hardware store owner Manny (Jack Albertson) and Belle Rosen (Shelley Winters), who have never taken a vacation and been hard workers all their lives. Ship singer Nonnie Parry (Carol Lynley), waiter Acres (Roddy McDowall) and hat salesperson James Martin (Red Buttons) are the other survivors who hang on when a tsunami hits the boat, flips it upside down and causes them to go on a long and deadly journey back through the body of the Poseidon.
This won two Oscars — for “The Morning After” and effects — and this led to a big wave — ugh, that pun — of disaster films. None of those have Gene Hackman screaming at God while being burned alive, but that’s the kind of magic you can only pull off once.
Except for the most dangerous sequences, all of the stunts were done by the actors themselves. And for those that love The Love Boat, Borgnine and Winters would play a married couple on an episode but the Pacific Princess did not capsize.
I had a priest as a kid who would start a sermon every month or two with, “The story is told…” and then would recount the story of this movie. Why a priest loved a Rene Cardona grindhouse movie about cannibalism enough to tell a small congregation the grisly details of it is still beyond me, but it’s a more fun church than you usually get.
Based on the 1973 book Survive! by Clay Blair, which is based on the true story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, this movie was somehow number one at the U.S. box office for one week, which blows my mind even further. Yes, people showed up to watch Rene and his son Rene make a movie about soccer players trying to decide between eating their dead teammates or starving to death and being eaten by their alive teammates.
Roger Ebert said, “Survive! is a fairly awful movie, but the essential heroism of its subject matter somehow emerges intact. That makes it a difficult movie to review — you can’t just dismiss it with cheap shots, you have to deal with the fact that it does have an emotional impact. It’s not a good movie or even a very professional one, but it does respect its subject matter and so we have to also.”
That’s why I loved Ebert, because even if he disliked a movie, he’d approach it as one to investigate.
The Cardona family never ran from crazy movies — showing real surgery in Night of the Bloody Apes, confronting terrorism and the CIA in Carlos the Terrorist, throwing celebrities into the meat grinders that were Cyclone and Bermuda Triangle and making Guyana: Cult of the Damnedmonths after Jonestown — taking their movies to an international audience who was hungry for, well, pure insanity usually.
All hail Hugo Stiglitz! All hail Norma Lazareno, once the luchadora heroine of Night of the Bloody Apes! All hail José Elías Moreno, who is in this and was Santa in Rene’s berserk Santa Claus! All hail Father Joe, who could barely out ashes on your forehead without making you look like you should be in Immortal!
Visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, The Tree of Life, The Towering Inferno) finally got the chance to direct with this movie and sadly, he didn’t get to capitalize on it
Made for one million dollars, one-tenth the budget of Kubrick’s classic, this movie was helped by all the special effects know-how of Trumbull, who was not originally going to direct it. Lead actor Bruce Dern stated that Trumbull’s creative vision was equal to Alfred Hitchcock, who he had also worked with. And that made the director hot for the briefest of times, as it flopped at the box office.
Trumbull joked “It was just a great experience for me as a filmmaker, but I didn’t know that I was part of an experiment by Universal Studios…to see if it was possible to have a movie survive on word of mouth alone without an advertising campaign.*”
At some point in the future, all that is left of Earth’s ecosystem is floating in space. The crew is ordered to destroy the greenery by the faceless bureaucrats that run what is left of the world and they comply, all save Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern, The ‘Burbs, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte, Coming Home), who has taken three service robots and gone into “silent running” around the rings of Saturn, keeping himself as sane as he can and what is left of Earth’s once lush forests blooming.
Written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino (the two would go on to write The Deer Hunter and Cimino would spectacularly self-destruct with Heaven’s Gate) and Steven Bochco (who would go on to create L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues and more), this is a quiet tale of a man whose only companions are the industrial droids he renames Huey, Dewey and Louie**.
The effects in this movie are obviously the draw. The ship Valley Forge was reused on the show Battlestar Galactica years later and still held up as a great looking spaceship, even post-Star Wars. And the haunting soundtrack was by Peter Schickele, better known for doing classical music parodies under the name of P.D.Q. Bach.
Without this movie, we’d have no Mystery Science Theater 3000, as the idea of a man lost in space with only robots to talk to resonated with creator Joel Hodgson. And speaking of inspiration, Trumbull was asked by George Lucas to work on this movie, but passed. Lucas asked if he could use a droid in his film inspired by the robots in Silent Running and Trumbull agreed. Six years later, when 20th Century-Fox sued Universal, claiming that Battlestar Galactica was a ripoff of Star Wars, Universal countersued with the theory that Star Wars ripped off Silent Running.
This was a film I searched for most my childhood, as we couldn’t just grab a DVD or stream films back then. I always saw photos of it in Starlog and wondered what the robots would look like when they moved.
The Arrow Video release of this film has everything you ever wanted on this film and more. There’s a new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, approved by Trumbull that was created exclusively for this release. Plus, you get a new commentary track by critics Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw and one from Trumbull and Dern. There are also features with film music historian Jeff Bond on the film’s score, Jon Spira exploring the screenplay and Dern on his work in the movie. Plus, the artwork is by Aric Roper, who did the art for Sleep’s “Dopesmoker” album and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and Peter Tonguette. You can get it from MVD.
*Actually, this really was part of a Universal Studios experiment to try and recreate Easy Riderby giving a million dollars or less to young filmmakers and letting them have final cut. The other films are Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, Hopper’s The Last Movie, Forman’s Taking Off and Lucas’ American Graffiti.
**The three drones were played by four bilateral amputees (Mark Person as Dewey, Cheryl Sparks and Steven Brown (he’s also in the biker mover J.C.) as Huey and Larry Whisenhunt as Louie). That means they are either missing both arms or both legs. This was inspired by sideshow performer Johnny Eck. Also, in Italy, the drones are named after Paperino, Paperone and Paperina (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and Daisy Duck) because the names for Huey, Dewey and Louie in Italy are Quim, Quo and Qua. Therefore, calling them would have sounding like this; “Vieni qui, Qui,” which would be pretty weird, right?
Unfortunately, Trumbull’s directing efforts didn’t fare much better with 1983’s Brainstorm.
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