Bella (Kristen Stewart), who has just given birth, is now a vampire. After Edward (Robert Pattinson) helps her satisfy her initial thirst, she meets their Renesmee. The rest of the Cullens and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) stay nearby and when he acts possessive toward her daughter, Bella argues with him and learns that he has imprinted on her. He goes even further by transforming into a wolf in front of her father (Billy Burke) and telling him that she’s a vampire.
Irina (Maggie Grace) believes that Renesmee is an Immortal child, a vampire that can’t be controlled and who can kill many people. The Volturi have outlawed these beings and are coming to destroy her. We see a brutal fight in which nearly everyone dies but it’s just a vision from Alice (Ashley Greene) to Aro (Michael Sheen), who still wants the battle. Then the Cullens reveal another half-human, half-vampire.
Oh yeah — somehow Bella has learned how to shield her thoughts from Edward because you know, this is totally an X-Men movie. She lets her defenses down and they reveal their love for one another. Both are happy that Renesmee will have Jacob to protect her.
I have reached the end of the Twilight Saga. Can I join the Volturi now?
As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 has extras like a commentary track by Bill Condon, another part of the series-length documentary, extended scenes and a music video for Green Day’s “The Forgotten.” Get this set exclusively from Best Buy.
27. MONSTERS… ALL?: Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolfman are (universal)ly adored. It’s time we start seeing other “people.”
There’s really no reason for this movie to exist.
Many people have tried and almost as many have failed to bring their vision of Dracula to the screen. For every Tod Browning and Karl Freund, for each Francis Ford Coppola or John Badham, there are just as many poorly received versions of the tale.
The Dario Argento of 2012 does not seem to be the person to be making this movie. Made after Giallo, a film that was considered — charitably — not the best of movies, Argento seemingly had a lot to prove. The visual stylist that made Deep Red, Suspiria, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage and Opera suddenly had movies that looked like made for TV films or episodic television instead of the dramatic flights of fancy that fill Tenebrae or even Sleepless. His movies became the law of diminishing returns and instead of being excited by the prospect of a new Argento movie, fans started to worry. I mean, I still haven’t watched Mother of Tears or this movie for so long.
Jonathan Harker (Unex Ugalde) is sent to the castle of Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann, who would go on to play Van Helsing on the 2013 Dracula series that aired in the U.S. on NBC) and becomes the blood donor for the count and his thrall Tania (Miriam Giovanelli). Meanwhile, his wife Mina (Marta Gastini) comes to London to stay with Lucy (Asia Argento), both of whom will soon be bitten by the vampire. You know the story and you know that Van Helsing (Rutger Hauer) will show up but did you know that he has garlic bullets?
As I wrote, we all know the story of Dracula so when an artist like Argento tells his version, we hope that we see it from a new angle. Or, as Coppola showed in his movie, that a famous director can still be indebted to Mario Bava and Terence Fisher. As for the acting, I never expect much, but Ugalde gives Keanu a run for the worst Harker I’ve seen. At least Hauer and Asia are fine in their roles.
That’s before we get into the effects. Yes, this was made in 2012, but the effects looked dated on release, as if they were from another decade or even more before. The scene where the count turns into a grasshopper must be seen to be believed.
Keep in mind that this movie had Luciano Tovoli as the cinematographer. The same person who did Suspiria and Tenebrae with Argento. I have no idea how they made a movie that looks this cheap. The colors are often muted to the point of blandness or worse, it looks like a house from the 70s with the brightest carpeting possible.
At least Claudio Simonetti did the music.
Giovanni Paolucci produced this. He also was behind the late era Mattei movies. If Bruno Mattei made this movie, I would be singing its praises. One because he died eight years before and the fact that he was back from the grave would make me so happy. Second, this is the kind of movie I expect from Mattei. From Argento, I expect more. That’s unfair, I realize, but when you make at least four — maybe five? — movies that I consider some of the best of all time, you get put on a different level. I also realize that your first album is your best album and this would be several albums from where Argento began but when you call a movie Argento’s Dracula, we want to see your specific stamp on it. Your stamp should not be CGI wolves that feel like they belong on a shirt from Wal-Mart.
In his book Fear, Argento said, “I was able to experiment with new movements and close-ups; using the most innovative technologies on the market means rediscovering the original wonder of the director’s job. It was as if what I was shooting had turned into the first movie of my career, and I had to learn everything from scratch.”
He also claims that his goal was to show Dracula’s romantic side and his transformation ability. “…for someone like myself who founded their very career on animals this was a unique opportunity to give free rein to my imagination. As so during the course of the film — thanks to digital effects — the Count turns into an owl, a wolf, a praying mantis, and materializes as a swarm of flies and an intrusion of cockroaches.” He also says that this was inspired by Hammer.
He also tells a story where he and Tovoli got lost in the rain. That seems to be what this movie is all about. A film about a great director lost with technology that he thinks is the future yet holds him in the past, unable to create something that stands the test of time.
I want to love this movie and it does everything it can to keep that from happening. The idea of the town working with the count? Great. The idea that there are hatchet murders in that town? Awesome. It goes nowhere. And there’s so much nudity and gore that you wonder, “Is Argento making his Joe D’Amato tribute?”
Also: This music video makes me laugh. I mean, no one told the drummer not to wear a jersey in a castle and maybe at least try and feel somewhat in the appropriate era?
October 22: A Horror Film Shot for less than S10,000 (That’s not found footage)
Former baseball players Ben (director and writer Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) are roaming the highways as a zombie outbreak has destroyed the world. They were trapped in a house in Massachusetts for three months. Mickey’s family is now dead and Ben won’t sleep inside. They also meet members of a survivors group known as the Orchid — Annie (Alana O’Brien) and Frank (Larry Fessenden) — who won’t allow them to join.
Ben forces Mickey to kill his first zombie and learn how to finally be someone who can make it in this world. Annie still won’t allow them to join and later causes Mickey to have to rescue Ben. He’s bitten by a zombie and has to be killed by his best friend. He promises Andy that he will get revenge.
When Ben and Mickey are trapped in the car surrounded by zombies, they get drunk and start singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” That part made me laugh even if it’s quite sad. This is an interesting movie. It cost $6,000 and was made very much as they went.
June 30: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Sequels! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
There’s no reason why sixth Universal Soldier movie is so good.
There’s also no reason why it goes so hard, because this is an NC-17 movie that starts with the hero, John (Scott Adkins), watching his wife and young daughter get shot in the head in a POV shot by Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who until now has been the hero of the UniSols.
And I mean, who could have guessed that director John Hyams would bring Apocalypse Now, The Manchurian Candidate, Chinatown and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to — again — the sixth movie in the series that started with a blockbuster.
John wakes up from a coma, only to learn that Luc is on the run and a sleeper agent named Magnus (Andrei Arlovski, the most winning fighter in UFC history) is on the loose, wiping out an entire brothel before a clone of Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) wipes his memory clear and frees him.
So yes, in the midst of this brave new world, Deveraux and Scott are gathering UniSols and radicalizing them against the U.S. government. I am all for this wildness.
John also learns that he was once a truck driver, that he was in love with Sarah (Mariah Bonner) and that he can regrow body parts because he’s an unstoppable killing machine. There’s also that original John, who has been co-opted by the government and the idea that everything that the new John believes is just weeks, not years, old.
Spoilers on, because the act of removing John’s memories drives him insane and he starts killing every UniSol, but that’s all part of Deveraux’s plan, to find a successor and sacrifice himself to him so that the dream of a new world order of UniSols can finally come true.
Written by Hyams, Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenlagh, this is a movie that starts with a doomed little girl saying “There are monsters in this house” and ends with Van Damme and Adkins having a strobe-lit, face-painted death match with machetes.
“From this moment on, you are no longer a slave to the government. From this moment on, your mind is your own. From this moment on, you will seek vengeance from your oppressors. Freedom is yours.”
Show me any action movie — hell, movie! — that tries for such loftier ideals and does it with three action stars and an MMA fighter in its cast. The fact that it took me so long to absorb this movie is a bit of stupidity I am going to pay back by being an evangelist for this film.
While this was directed and written by Brian De Palma, this is an English-language remake of Alain Corneau’s 2010 thriller film Love Crime with a different ending. It’s an erotic thriller but you know, it’s also very much a thriller. Or a giallo. Or what De Palma does best, you know?
Christine Stanford (Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls) is an American advertising exec in Germany, working on a smartphone campaign with her Isabelle (Noomi Rapace, who played Lisabeth Sanders in the original Dragon Tattoo movies). Christine ends up taking the credit for their idea, which is well-received, but she never apologizes. Instead, she confides how her twin sister — oh man, De Palma hitting all his notes — died. But that’s when Isabelle’s assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) convinces her to upload her own version of the ad which soon goes viral.
Christine drops a bomb on her former protege by leaking a sex tape of Isabelle having an affair with her husband Dirk (Paul Anderson), which causes her to have a nervous breakdown, crash her car, go into a depression and start abusing drugs. She doesn’t stop, as she tries to get both Dani and Isabelle fired using blackmail from a threatening letter written on Isabelle’s computer.
So when Christine dies, is it any surprise that the police jail Isabelle? She confessed while high, plus there’s that revenge letter and evidence of a scarf’s fibers on the dead body. But how could that happen when Isabelle was at the ballet? Maybe it was really Dirk, who has the actual bloody scarf in his car.
The end of this movie is like having an entire chum bucket of red herrings and twist endings all dumped on you at the same time and I love every minute of it. It’s ridiculous but also you can nearly hear De Palma laughing as he puts up on the screen.
Rapace and Adams arrived in Berlin a week before shooting started to rehearse the screenplay and had a lot of suggestions for the relationship of the characters, including making the lesbian subtext actual text. De Palma was a bit overwhelmed with changing the screenplay and also prepping the shooting, so Natalie Carter, who co-wrote Love Crime, came in to work with the actresses to add their new scenes.
Malice began as a web series created by Philip J. Cook. Desperate for a fresh start after Nate Turner’s (Mark Hyde, who shows up in nearly all of Cook’s films) return from active duty in Afghanistan, the Turner family retreats to their late grandmother’s house in rural Virginia.
However, mother Jessie (Leanna Chamish) and their daughters Abbey (Rebekkah Johnson) and Alice (Brittany Martz) — who becomes the hero of this series — barely have time to unpack before all sorts of horrors show up, as the house is the gateway to another dimension.
Tensions start to ramp up as family members one at a time start to disappear. It’s up to Alice – the youngest and the one with the richest imagination — to solve the mysteries of her family’s plight and survive.
Basically, imagine Alice In Wonderland but made by someone in love with the idea of making everything a digital world, much less one that has a mushroom god living under a house and a father who bonds with his daughters by sharing a beer and shooting the heads off statues in a graveyard with an M16. Like everything. Cook has made, this is very much his own vision of what a movie should be and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The world has too many people willing to make movies that have the edges all sanded off that fit together in artificially perfect ways. When I seek out a movie made by Cook, I know that perhaps some things may not look real, but they end up being better than that, because they’re exactly what he wanted them to be.
I just wish I had been watching these episode by episode on the internet and waiting for the next episode as if it were a modern movie serial.
Radio talk show host Ryan King (Matthew Perry) has barely taken any time to get over the death of his wife. He just wants to get back to work, but his boss Steven (John Cho) won’t allow him back on the air until he goes to grief counseling.
Ryan joins a support group but he could really care less. However, the way he approaches the sessions actually helps the others in his group. Led by the barely trained Lauren Bennett (Laura Benanti), the members are Anne (Julie White), a lesbian proscutor unable to get past the loss of her partner; Yolanda Mitsawa (Suzie Nakamura), whose fiancee ran off; Owen Lewis (Tyler James Williams), whose brother is in a coma; Mr. K (Brett Gelman), who has a mysterious job with NASA and who also refuses to reveal why he’s there; Sonia (Sarah Baker), who misses her cat; Fausta (Tonita Castro), whose father and brother just died; Danny (Seth Morris), whose wife had a child with another man while he served in the army; George (Bill Cobbs), who is dealing with the loss of his sight and a former member of the group who shows up from time to time, Simone (Piper Perabo), who Lauren dislikes, perhaps because she starts dating Ryan.
Scott Silveri, who was a writer and executive producer on Friends, also created Joey, which was another sitcom with an alumni of the show. While that Matt leBlanc sitcom lasted for two seasons, this show only lasted one. Maybe all the sadness on the show was a bit much for viewers. Or perhaps they didn’t like how it felt so much like Community.
I love sitcoms and had never seen this show before, so I enjoyed sitting down with it and getting to know its characters. Ever since the first Newhart series and Dear John, group therapy has been a perfect t story engine for comedy shows. It works here, as you really enjoy the interplay between the characters. Gelman is probably the most entertaining of all of them and his governement ties are funny when you consider that a decade later, he’d be known as the conspiracy obsessed Murray Bauman on Stranger Things.
This was streaming for some time on the Roku channel, but seeing as how you can never tell when things are going to be removed, it’s a really cool thing to own this DVD set of the only season of the show. I wish we could have seen where a second season would have gone.
April 13: Kayfabe Cinema — A movie with a pro wrestler in it.
Directed by Michael Hoffman Jr. and Aaron T. Wells from a script by Hoffman, Ryan Dee and Meghan Jones, Girls Gone Dead uses borrowed interest to get you to watch this movie that’s really just an 80s slasher.
For the fans of those films, Linnea Quigley plays a bartender. For Howard Stern Show lovers, there’s Sal Governale and Beetlejuice. Do you like hevay metal? Here’s Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. For, well, anyone who likes adult film hates Ron Jeremy, but he’s in this. Finally, for lovers of pro wrestling, the sheriff is played by Jerry “The King” Lawler.
A bunch of girls head to Daytona Beach for spring break and end up being part of a Girls Gone Wild-style event for Crazy Girls Unlimited. However, there’s a killer in their midst and everyone, every single girl named for characters from Saved By the Bell is in danger.
At over a hundred minutes, this movie somehow proves that naked women can be boring, which is not a sentence that I ever want to write. Jim Wynorski could make this movie so much better just by being near the set, but instead, you get a generic fill in the blank slasher with scenes of women partying on the beach, which may be fun when you’re in your early stages of being able to drink legally but all feels frankly exhausting today.
Remember a few weeks ago when I watched La cripta de las condenadas? This is supposed to be a hundred years later. Fata Morgana is still in control of these women — Carmen Montes from Snakewoman, Eva Palmer from Jess Franco’s Perversion and actresses who only appeared in this film and its sequel: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven — who are trapped in what should be a crypt but is really Jess Franco’s apartment and man, what was it with the seventies, sex and wicker? And this is thirty-some-odd years later?
I’m putting to the test that theory that you’ve never seen a Franco movie until you’ve seen them all. Somehow, he convinced these women to writhe all over his big shaggy carpet and in bed and, yes, on that wicker and made it seem like the angel of death was coming for them through some words pasted in parts if you could remain awake to read them, that is.
That said, if you can get a career doing what you love — and we have to imagine that like Sisyphus had to love the rock, Franco loved zooming in tight on pubic mounds — then you’re a success. Jess made money from this and succeeded from beyond the grave by having people like me watch movies like this.
The description? “A group of women is locked in a cemetery crypt, convicted of an old curse. This kind of succubi, lewd and wicked, indulging years pass all kinds of sexual pleasures.”
The actual movie? Jess Franco in one or two rooms watching women writhe around and zoom in and out of their curves for 90 minutes or so.
Also, that’s no crypt. It’s someone’s apartment and may as well be Franco’s.
Crypt of the Condemned is all shot in an orange haze, all soft focus as women writhe on a white carpet that seems a lot like the one Joan Collins got blood all over in Tales from the Crypt. How do you keep a carpet like that so white an clean? Why would you have sex all over an impossible-to-clean and maintain shag?
The ladies on hand include writer and cinematographer Fata Morgana (she also made Montes de Venus with Franco), Carmen Montes from Snakewoman, Eva Palmer from Jess Franco’s Perversion and actresses who only appeared in this film and its sequel: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven.
Let’s dispense with questions like, “Should you watch that?” Jess Franco’s normal films are an acquired taste, much less his late-career digital video efforts, which are just him being a creepy fly on the wall while women pose and occasionally touch one another and classic music plays. An Exterminating Angel is on the way, and I guess if I knew that, I’d be doing the same as them.
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