This Japanese yakuza gangster-noir written, directed and edited by Takeshi Kitano was his response to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Courtesy of Quentin Tarantino’s fandom, the film found its way to U.S. theater — art house — screens in 1998 via his Rollling Thunder-imprint, which subsequently released it to home video in 2000. Of Kitano’s 18-film writing-directing […]
What can I possibly say about this bizarre (which is an understatement if there ever was one) Takashi Miike low-budget direct-to-video horror — with its mix of mobsters and ghosts and breast milk and cow-headed men — that hasn’t already been said. For if you are a Miike fan, you’ve seen it. If you’re a […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: You can check out an alternate viewpoint from R.D Francis in this article. This movie is so not from our reality and that makes me love it so much. Imagine a world in which Nick West (Martin Hewitt) can put on a nightly radio show where he gets multiple female callers to have […]
Ten years ago, we embarked on a journey that would take us places, physically and emotionally, one that would change us as artists and people, forever. Two and a half years. Fifty-two shooting days. Freezing cold. Scorching heat. Metric tons of Little Caesars, potential tetanus, and good, good times. — The filmmakers Shortly after dying […]
One look at that theatrical one-sheet combined with that title: you know you’re getting a space comedy that owes its clever cues to John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974). Sure, we could mention the quicky-came-and-quickly-forgotten Space Station 76 (2014), itself a retro-parody of ’70s science fiction television series that used Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Space: 1999 […]
The kings of the U.S. “Big Three” network TV movies are back: David Janssen (Wolf of the Moon) is in front of the camera, with director Jerry Jameson behind the lens (the Drive-In’er The Bat People, the runaway box-office hit, Airport ’77, and TV’s knockoff of The Towering Inferno, aka Terror on the 40th Floor). […]
Director William A. Graham, who worked with Elvis Presley on Change of Habit (1969) — and too many TV series to mention (but we’ll mention Trapped Beneath the Sea (1974) and Beyond the Bermuda Triangle (1975) and the excellent, 1977 Frank Sinatra-starrer, Contract on Cherry Street) knocks it out of the park . . . […]
“There ain’t gonna be no rematch.” — Apollo Creed, telling you there won’t be a “Philippine War Week III” Thank god. The last and final, ever, Philippine war flick reviewed on this site (well, sans the idiotic Commando Invasion snafu that led us to review it, twice, this week). We started this nonsense four months […]
Well, it had to end sometime. Two weeks (the last one was during the first week of August) and 48 films. Sure, there’s oh so much more Vietnam war raging in the South Pacific — and just as many jungle-based sci-fi off-shoots, such as Reb Brown starring in Bruno Mattei’s Robowar. But we just can’t, […]
Richard Young. Only 50 credits to his resume, but what a bunch of films: Night Call Nurses (1972), Inferno in Paradise (1974), Cocaine Cowboys (1979), High Risk (1981), The Ice Pirates (1984), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) — and don’t forget Saigon Commandos (1988), which, you guess it, pinches footage off the earlier […]
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