I’m always kind of interested in when a cartoon revises its characters to become characters from A Christmas Carol. Daffy Duck, yes, I buy him as Scrooge, now running a big store called Lucky Duck and ruining the lives of the other Looney Tunes. Also, because there aren’t all that many Looney Tunes to go around, this has to go deep cut and include characters like Playboy Penguin, Priscilla Pig, Egghead Jr., Henery Hawk and Barnyard Dawg Jr. along with the characters that everyone knows.
Porky is Bob Cratchit, Sylvester the Cat is Jacob Marley, Granny and Tweety are the Ghost of Christmas Past, Yosemite Sam as the Present and Tasmanian Devil is the Future. As for other characters, most of them — Pepé Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn, The Three Bears, Sam Sheepdog, Claude Cat, Charlie Dog, Miss Prissy, Gossamer, Barnyard Dawg, Mac, Tosh, Hippety Hopper, Beaky Buzzard, Pete Puma, Hubie and Bertie — all work in the store.
Bugs Bunny just starts the whole thing off and keeps coming back to upset the duck. This doesn’t get into the sadness of the Charles Dickens story to the level that A Flintstones Christmas Carol gets into. I mean, that leans into death like no cartoon I’ve seen outside of Japanese ones.
But you know, if you want to put on a modern Looney Tunes and see how they’d treat a classic, here it is. I know that this is where as old man I need to mention that I grew up on the originals and how much better they would be than this, but man, all these battles against the fact that things are always worse and that this was made 17 years ago and there have been worse things since then has diminished my fighting edge.
Chiisaki Yūsha-tachi Gamera (Little Hero: Gamera) is the 12th Gamera movie and the second reboot. It’s also the first movie in the series made by Kadokawa Daiei Studio after the company purchased Daiei Film. There was no sequel and no more Gamera films until 2023’s Gamera Rebirth animated series.
In 1973, Kousuke (Kanji Tsuda) watched as the town of Shima, Mie was destroyed by several Gyaos until Gamera saved the day, helping everyone to escape before destroying himself to stop the threat. Thirty three years later, he’s a widower with a son named Toru (Ryo Tomioka). Life is hard and his son worries constantly about losing everyone in his life after the death of his mother.
One day, he and his friends Katsuya and Ishimaru discover an egg near where Gamera was last seen. It soon grows into a small turtle that can spin and fly just like the larger kaiju. He’s just in time, as there’s another kaiju called Zedus who is eating people and destroying cities. He easily defeats Toto who is saved by the government and healed. However, the red stone that is needed to give him his full power has been given to Toru’s friend Mai (Kaho) for luck as she goes into surgery.
Directed by Ryuta Tasaki, who has directed several Kamen Rider movies, and written by Yukari Tatsui, this had some complain that it was too kid-friendly. Maybe they hadn’t watched any Gamera movies before, those that believed all the older movies were for grown-ups.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Tony Todd
Directed by Jonathan English and written by Nick Green and Stephen McDool, Minotaur starts in the time of King Deucalion (Tony Todd). Each year, eight young adults are taken from the village and dropped into an underground labyrinth to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Theo (Tom Hardy) is still angry that his beloved Fion was sacrificed. When he learns that she’s still alive, he begs his father, the village chief Cyman (Rutger Hauer), to let him be part of the sacrifices along with Danu (Jonathan Readwin), Morna (Maimie McCoy), Tyro (Lex Shrapnel), Didi (Lucy Brown), Vena (Fiona Maclaine), Ziko (James Bradshaw) and Nan (Claire Murphy).
As they are being killed by the beast in the maze, Deucalion’s sister and lover, Queen Raphaella (Michelle Van Der Water) saves them. She also reveals how the monster came to this world. Her mother committed bestiality to create a living god. As the minotaur became stronger, it started killing, starting with Raphaella and Deucalion’s brother. This murder was based on the village that Theo comes from, which is why they have to send sacrifices every year. She sent word that his lover was still alive so that he would come, as she believed that he was the only one who could kill her monstrous half-brother.
And now, the battle has begun.
Beyond Tony Todd, I watched this because Ingrid Pitt is in it.
11. ⬆⬆⬇⬇⬅➡⬅➡🅱🅰: Select and start a movie based on a video game.
Look, I want to say something like, “Dead or Alive series depicts a collection of skilled martial artists in a worldwide competition that’s sponsored by the DOATEC (Dead or Alive Tournament Executive Committee), a massive corporation with unknown motives,” but really the video game series is Street Fighter with breasts and butts. I mean, the spin-off Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball had a mode where you got girls to perform tasks for you and then take photos of them while they posed.
It was created by Team Ninja and Tomonobu Itagaki. Itagaki has said that “violence and eroticism were needed for true entertainment.”
I’m not decrying exploitation.
I’m just telling you this is a different video game experience.
How amazing is it that the movie based on the game is so good? That’s probably because of the cast and the director. Corey Yuen directed this! The same director who made Dragons Forever, No Retreat, No Surrender and the action scenes for Lethal Weapon 4, Romeo Must Die, Kiss of the Dragon, The One, Cradle 2 the Grave, War and The Expendables.
If you’ve played the game, you know the fighters, but let me get into them for those who may not know anything about all of these bikini ladies and ninjas.
Tina Armstrong is a pro wrestler who made it to the finals of the first DOA tournament, won the second, became a supermodel, a rock star and a politician. She’s played by Jaime Pressly and her father, Bass, the pro wrestler who raised her as a single dad, is Kevin Nash.
Kasumi is played by Devon Aoki, daughter of the man who brought Benihana to America. She’s a ninja princess of the Mugen Tenshin Ninja Clan. She’s the main character of the series and also appears in the Ninja Gaidan games.
Christie Allen is a master thief and killer who is way meaner in the games than she is in the movie. She’s played by Holly Valance.
Helena Douglas is the daughter of DOATEC’s founder, who has recently died, and is running the tournament along with Donovan (Eric Roberts). She’s played by Sarah Carter.
Natassia Malthe is Ayane, a ninja assassin who is trying to kill Kasumi, who is being protected by Ryu Hayabusa, the star of Ninja Gaidan, who is played by the son of the man who introduced ninjas to America. Yes, that’s Kane Kosugi. They’re also looking for her brother Hayate (Collin Chou).
Plus, there’s Christie’s partner Max (Matthew Marsden), Zack (Brian J. White) who eventually runs the island that Dead or Alive Xtreme is on, Russian soldier Bayman (Derek Boyer), Robin Shou as a pirate, Brad Wong (Song Lin), Lei Fang (Ying Wang), Hitomi (Hung Lin) and Gen Fu (Fang Liu).
This movie was a lot of work with the actresses all training for three months and Yuen having two crews working 17 hours a day, getting four hours of sleep and then waking up to shoot.
The plot is, well, every single martial arts tournament movie you’ve ever seen, but it’s also a movie as relentlessly devoted to gorgeous women kicking people in the face, smiling right into the camera and then a butt, crotch or breast is seen before more fighting. It’s absolutely shameless and yet, isn’t that what we want from a video game movie? I love how reviewers expected something more, like this was great literature. I’ve played all the games, I won’t lie and they’re relentless and brutal fighters that are a lot of fun. But they also have volleyball mini-games and all of the girls have multiple outfits that are all very revealing. Sometimes, you need to shut off your brain and enjoy things.
SPOILER WARNING: You can probably consider this review a bit unobjective seeing as how I love this movie so much and contributed to the commentary and liner notes for the blu ray release.
You should totally buy it from MVD because it comes with a limited edition slipcase New Hampshire Forest Scent air freshener, commentary with director Rob Roy, another commentary with Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum and me, an interview with Rob Roy, the Rifftrax version of the movie, a music video, bloopers, a trailer, liner notes, a mini-poster, a sticker set and a reversible blu ray sleeve.
Director and writer Rob Roy has had a strong connection to wolves his entire life. It started after he first saw Balto, which inspired him to create his own wolf film. The film you’re about to reach about. The film during which he attempted to contact Balto star Kevin Bacon for a cameo before being somewhat ironically chased off the actor’s property by dogs.
He told the Nashua Telegraph, “Let me say first of all that I am an animal lover. No werewolves were hurt during the making of Lycan Colony. I’ve always loved werewolf movies, but I’m tired of seeing the same storyline over and over again. The werewolf is always a sick tormented beast. He’s always the bad guy. In Lycan Colony, we filled a whole town with them. Some are good, some are bad. None of them are these simple monsters that show up for five minutes at the end of the movie. They’re the life and blood of a modern town, and much closer to us than we’re used to seeing in these movies.”
Roy is self-taught and learned every aspect of filmmaking – from make-up effects to building his own camera dollies, animatronic heads and blood sprayers as well as building his own blue-screen shooting area in his garage – while making this movie.
Dr. Daniel Solomon (Bill Sykes), a disgraced alcoholic surgeon, and his family move to a small town in the wake of one of his surgeries under the influence costing a patient their life. He has an AA sponsor so bad that he takes him to a bar afterward, a bar where he meets a brother and sister who are ex-military and looking for their adventurer father. Seconds after they explain the inscription on their father’s watch, the bartender ends up dropping it on their table, which is like Chekov’s gun going off before you even see it. This leads to a werewolf attack within the bar, the military brother getting killed and Daniel falling through what can only be a warp zone to escape.
Meanwhile, Daniel’s son Stewart (Ryan O Roy) has fallen for Sarah (Libby Collins), who comes ot his room late at night and brings him to a graveyard where she bites his chest and makes him one of the cursed under the full moon.
Who can save the day? Maybe it’s Athena, the witch played by Kristi Lynn, who loaned all of her exotic animals to this movie which still doesn’t explain why a spider monkey randomly shows up at the end. She licks everything with sight and then explains the history of werewolves in animation that I am not even remotely sure can be referred to as animation. Speaking of animation, the military guy has a neck tattoo that was added in post and it flickers. It’s the most disconcerting take-you-out-of-the-movie thing I’ve ever seen and yes, it is awesome.
Made in Hudson, Bedford, Goffstown, Merrimack and Manchester, New Hampshire — which is why this had the tagline “Welcome to New Hampshire…Live free or die!” — you’ll perhaps struggle with some of the accents. These towns are the homes of stars like Seth Meyers, Sarah Silverman, Jane Balder from V, Grace Metalious who wrote Peyton Place and Adam Sandler. Perhaps most relevant to this film are the facts that GG Allin was born there as well as The Howlingstar Christopher Stone.
Keeping it local, the movie premiere at Chunky’s Cinema Pub in Pelham on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005 with a concert/film screening/Halloween costume contest extravaganza. At Chunky’s you can order a Caesar Romero Salad, Wizard of Ozzarella Sticks, Reservoir Dogs (yes hot dogs), the Parmageddon Chicken Sandwich, a Kevin Bacon Burger, a Carrie Cosmo, the Catalina Wine Mixer Sangria, Jurassic Pork Tacos, Rum Forrest Rum or a Jabba the Hot Fudge Sundae.
If you ask Rob Roy, he says that this movie is about “The sensual underbelly of animalistic human beings and what happens when we surrender to that.” He’s expanded the universe of the film in Rage of the Theriomorphs, a book in which Dr. Dan, Dave, Russ, Stew, and Sarah are back and getting accustomed to their new lives and new rules. A new mysterious death has caused an uproar and a new threat to the entire town has arrived. This needs to be a movie, right?
Lycan Colony is the kind of movie that shuts off my brain and lets someone else drive. I never really recovered.
Michael Mann was an executive producer on the original Miami Vice, so it makes sense that he returned to direct, write and co=produce this reimagined movie.
Starring Colin Farrell as James “Sonny” Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs, this film was inspired by Foxx discussing the show with Mann at a party for the movie Ali. Mann would go a bit wild on this one, leading crew members to say that he made sudden script changes, filmed in unsafe weather conditions (the film was delayed by three hurricanes) and filming in places that “even the police avoid, drafting gang members to work as security.”
Since making the movie, Mann thinks of it as one of the ones that got away, because after guns were fired near the Paraguay location, Fox went home. The production than couldn’t afford to go back, so the compromised ending just doesn’t work for Mann. He said, “I don’t know how I feel about it. I know the ambition behind it, but it didn’t fulfill that ambition for me because we couldn’t shoot the real ending.”
It’s also a wild movie because where the series was fashion and pastel colors — and this still has fashion, of course — this film is just darkness. Drug informants’ wives get their heads blown off with C4 necklaces. Said informant walks in the way of a truck. And the movie moves past Florida to drug hot spots and involves Sonny in a doomed relationship with Isabella (Gong Li), the financial wizard and lover of Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar).
I’ve had this conversation before, but if this was called something other than Miami Vice, people would have loved every moment of it. When that name came out, people immediately thought of the theme song and the past versus allowing this digitally shot piece of style to succeed on its own.
That said, we now live in a reality where you can watch it again and again without ever needing to associate it with anything else.
The Mill Creek steelbox of Miami Vice is exclusively available from WalMart. Extras include behind the scenes features and commentary by Michael Mann.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on .
Based on The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, which is in turn based on the unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short — one in which her black hair had been bleached and then dyed red before she was surgically sliced in half with a technique called a hemicorporectomy, her skin washed and her body was posed with her hands above her head, elbows bent at right angles and legs spread apart — this 2006 Brian DePalma movie was in development hell until L.A. Confidential was a success and Ellroy’s books got hot.
The director’s cut of the film ran over three hours but was cut down to a little over two hours for the producers. Ellroy was highly critical of the released film and claims that the original cut is a superior version of the film and more faithful to his book.
After a boxing match between them, LAPD detectives Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) become partners and friends, bonding as a trio with Lee’s girlfriend Katherine “Kay” Lake (Scarlett Johansson). Beyond her trying to sleep with Dwight outside of her relationship, she’s also branded with the initials of the mobster whose arrest made Dwight’s career.
On January 15, 1947, their lives change when the Black Dahlia’s body is found.
Dwight soon learns from Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank) that Elizabeth was a lesbian and appeared in smoker films, a fact she doesn’t want to be connected with, so she sleeps with him in exchange for his silence and then introduces him to her rich parents. Meanwhile, the man whose initials are on Kay, Bobby DeWitt (Richard Brake) is out of jail, so Lee attempts to kill him and dies in the process. That grief causes Dwight and Kay to finally make love, but when she follows him later, she sees him with Madeleine, the woman who looks like the Black Dahlia who so obsessed her now dead husband.
The end of this goes beyond noir and pulp to madness, as incestual pornographic films, ruined rich families and femme fatales nearly wipe out most of the main players, which also includes Fiona Shaw as Madeleine’s mother, John Kavanagh as her father and Mia Kirschner as the ghostly Dahlia, seen only in flashbacks and death. Kirschner was originally on set simply to feed lines to other actors in their screen tests. potential actors in screen tests. De Palma and writer Josh Friedman cast her and expanded her role from the novel. As Kirschner resembled the real Dahlia, she knew a good deal about the case and had always been told if there was a movie about the murder, she should be in it.
Plus, the cast also has Rose McGowan, Rachel Miner, Angus MacInnes (Rosey from Strange Brew), Mike Starr (the hired killer from Dumb and Dumber) and DePalma regular — and Phantom of the Paradise— William Finley in his final film.
DePalma kept up his string of being seen as a woman hater by winning the Alliance of Women Film Journalists Hall of Shame for this. Other films inducted in 2006 were A Good Year, Basic Instinct 2, Beerfest, Little Man, My Super-Ex Girlfriend and You, Me and Dupree as well as Mel Gibson inducted for his languge about women when he was arrested for drunk driving.
David Fincher had originally planned to direct this movie as a multi-hour mini-series in black and white. He left the project when he saw that he wouldn’t be able to make it to his standards. While I like this movie, I would absolutely go wild seeing what Fincher would have done.
This is as much a car movie as it is one about people making the dumbest decisions. Like therapist Orianna (Mimi Rogers), who decides to try a technique in which she tries to put Penny (Rachel Miner) right into the trauma she has avoided since her parents died in a car accident. Immersion therapy? I don’t know. I went to art school. But then, while on a road trip with penny, Orianna hits a hitchhiker and instead of calling the police, she decides to give that injured man a ride.
What follows is the hitchhiker stabbing one of their tires and nearly killing them. Well, he goes all the way and murdered Orianna,then wedges the car between two trees and tortures Penny by making her do her breathing exercises and, you know, cutting off one of her toes when he isn’t murdering everyone around her.
Mickey Jones, who teamed with Michael Ironside in the series version of V, and Michael Berryman are in the cast. Directed by Richard Brandes, who wrote the script with Diane Doniol-Valcroze and Arthur Flam (who were also the writers of the vehicular homicide movie Hit and Run and the movie Kill By Inches, which is about a murderous tailor who can’t measure anything properly and thus becomes a killing machine), this movie literally has Mimi Rogers dead in the car for most of its running time. What a role.
Also: the same license plate on the car in this was the plate for Nash Bridge‘s 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, a car that Bridges claimed they only made 14 of. Well, it’s actually a 1971 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda, a Plymouth Barracuda with a Hemi V8 and a special design that really was only for one year. According to Hot Cars, this model had not only the distinctive fender gills of this car and the shaker hood from the 1970 edition, but also four headlights and improved taillights. But Nash may have been off on how many there are, as estimates go from single digits to eleven made. Eleven! These things sell for around $3.3 million. So that means the cars for the show were custom-made fakes. There were four cars: a 5.5-liter Barracuda with a shaker hood, two 5.2-liter Barracudas and a 7.2-liter version that were all made by Frank Benetti and his Same Day Paint and Body Shop in Newhall, Los Angeles.
I told you all that about that car because honestly, it’s way more interesting than Penny Dreadful.
April 6: Viva Mexico — Pick a movie from Mexico and escribir acerca de por qué es tan increíble.
Lucha libre movies were a big deal from the 1950s to 1980s, but kind of went away, ironically at the same time that lucha had a major boom by finally being on TV. Yes, unlike America, wrestling often stayed off TV in Mexico, instead using magazines and newspapers for promotion. That all changed when one of the largest promotions, CMLL, began appearing on the national Televisa network in the early 1990s.
Lucha is very conservative — despite the high flying ring style — and has only changed when renegades left their home promotions. For example, Francisco Flores, along with EMLL trainer Ray Mendoza, broke away from EMLL (the old name for CMLL, which you can consider very similar; it was formed in 1933 and is still around to this day) because they were too restrictive, taking many of the younger wrestlers and those that had not really been pushed — including Fishman, Perro Aguayo, El Canek, Dos Caras and Villano III — and forming the Universal Wrestling Association. While they were the main national competition to CMLL, by the late 80s, the companies were working together and many of their wrestlers left to work for CMLL.
The nail in the coffin of UWA was another renegade, Antonio Peña. The company remained stuck in the past and matchmaker Juan Herrera preferred heavyweight wrestlers who stuck to the traditions of lucha libre, while Peña — who wrestled as Espectro Jr., Dalia Negra, The Rose, Espectro de Ultratumba and Kahoz, a rudo who would invoke evil spirits before his match and release live pigeons before he fought, sometimes even appearing to have bitten the head off of one of them and being covered in blood — was a fan of faster-moving wrestlers like Konnan, Octagon, Mascara Sagrada and the mini-estrella division, in which wrestlers under 5’1″ were not in comedy matches but instead high action battles.
After Paco Alonso, the owner of CMLL, kept ignoring booking ideas, he began negotiations with Televisa. They paid for Asistencia Asesoría y Administración (AAA) and now owned their own lucha libre promotion, leading to an even bigger boom — despite the hardliners claiming TV would ruin their live gates — that only died out when the peso was devalued.
CMLL and AAA are still in business, but man, in the 90s, AAA boasted one of the most exciting rosters ever. In addition to Konnan and Octagon becoming gigantic stars, it was where Rey Mysterio Jr. got his first major fame, as well as having a roster that included Psicosis, El Hijo del Santo, Eddy Guerrero and his partner Love Machine Art Barr, Blue Panther, Cien Caras, Blue Panther, Heavy Metal, La Parka and so many more.
It’s funny — Konnan leaving AAA just followed the same formula — he returned — and CMLL is still considered way too conservative, thirty years after AAA was created.
El Luchador Implacable is a throwback to the other way that lucha libre was once promoted. Stars like El Santo, Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras and more often appeared in movies that were created to draw fans back to the arenas.
It’s about a motorcycle gang that is running wild until they make the mistake of attacking a pro wrestler: Dos Caras Jr.!
Dos Caras Jr. — the nephew of Mil Mascaras — would eventually lose his mask voluntarily when he left Mexico behind to find fame in America as part of the WWE. That said — he did do a few MMA matches with the mask on!
Known as Alberto Del Rio, he became the only man to hold the WWE, WWE World Heavyweight, Impact World, GFW Global, AAA Mega and CMLL World Heavyweight Championship titles. He’s been controversial — that’s putting it mildly — figure due to multiple scandals but is currently back in AAA.
At the time this was made, he was still in CMLL and while there, he would be one of the few of his family members — El Sicodélico Sr., his uncle, was also a rudo — to be a bad guy. He kind of struggled in CMLL as one way that the company changed was that heavyweights weren’t pushed as hard as they were in the pre-UWA days. Unlike most luchadors, Del Rio is 5’6″ and 239 pounds, so he has some size.
Other luchadors that show up in this include Silver King (who was Ramses in Nacho Libre), Rey Bucanero, Hector Garza, Olimpico and Ultimo Guerrero, as well as Rey Myserio Jr. I wonder if some of this movie was filmed while Rey wrestled just ten matches for CMLL in 2001-2002. Mysterio started the year this movie was made by winning the Royal Rumble, then the world title from Randy Orton, becoming a bigger superstar than he ever was before, even if he had to change his name, removing the Jr. as Vince McMahon hates the name as he suffered being called Junior most of his early life.
El Luchador Implacable isn’t bad, but when compared to the movies of lucha libre’s history, it kind of pales in comparison. There are no mummies, no aliens, no werewolves transforming in the middle of the ring.
Lukas Moodysson said that this was “a black and white silent movie with sound” and used this sentence to set it up: “A woman in a man’s body. A man in a woman’s body. Jesus in Mary’s stomach. The water breaks. It floods into me. I can’t close the lid. My heart is full.”
As Jena Malone reads what sounds like an off the cuff soliloquy, we watch as Man (Peter Lorentzon), a man in women’s clothing, shares the screen with the ghost of Woman, an ideal he feels that he will never reach.
It’s been so incredible watching all of Moodyson’s films in sequence as he goes from the somewhat traditional feel — while still having a unique look — of Show Me Love and his films grow darker and less like ordinary narratives until by this point, it’s nearly just images against Malone’s monotone delivery, which is way more intriguing than that word choice may suggest.
I can see how some people would come to this movie and hate it. I was intrigued by how Moodysson uses a completely alien form to tell truths.
The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.
Extras include interviews with Moodysson, a feature on the themes of this movie, a trailer and an image gallery.
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