oulamies

That blurb by Jean-Luc Godard is one of those absurd sentiments implying the artistic and intellectual superiority of the Nouvelle Vogue, a conviction which has snowballed rather effectively down generations of cinephiles who adorn their shelves with Criterion Collection editions of these movies, supplied with the necessary bonus features that illuminate at length why the tedious artefact they just sat through is a philosophical goldmine. Good stuff to recitate if someone happens to ask you why that movie about a donkey is your most treasured cinematic experience.

Because by God, does it blow! An alarmingly wooden set of characters populate this clunky, sorry excuse for a story comprised of dull, rural French vignettes with the titular donkey shoehorned in to fulfill Bresson's vision. The animal, whose actual point is (mercifully) left obscure for me, is in fact the best part of the film, since the sheer apathy it by nature has towards this art project ends up being very relatable.

The humans, on the other hand, do nothing but irritate with their stiffness and godawful, robotic lines. The few developments with cinematic potential are kept firmly off-screen. Kind of like a Jean Rollin film without all the psychedelic fantastique elements. Why didn't Bresson just write a damn book?

Before concluding by calling this film a pretentious heap, let us remind ourselves of 'A Man Escaped', a nice assurance that when backed by a proper, suspensive narrative, Bresson's style was able to yield one of the best prison movies in history. But Balthazar is a pretentious heap, do not bother.

'The Horrible Dr. Hichcock' is a lacklustre Italian gothic, suffering from the same inability as Mario Bava's 'The Whip and the Body' to do any justice to its potent subject matter. Now, one does not of course expect an escapade in vein of 'Nekromantik' from an early 60s film. But Riccardo Freda simply refuses to address the titular doctor's (supposed) psychosexual secret, opting instead to pad the wafer-thin plot with impossibly uninspired haunted mansion scares. Steele's screen presence does little to remedy the tired nonsense on display.

Then, to our further dismay, the few atmospheric moments are marred by a horrendously loud and heavy-handed score, likely there as an attempt to compensate for the bankruptcy of visual drama. Take for instance a scene in the beginning where our doctor is calmly performing a routine injection of an anesthetic for his wife, accompanied by a totally crazed orchestra whose intensity would be unmatched even in Frankenstein's 'It's Alive' scene...

Beware, this dreck is bound to be a letdown even for major gothic horror fans.

If only Heaven's Gate was as interesting to watch as it is to talk about. It's telling that I had seen Final Cut, the Willem Dafoe-narrated documentary about the making of the film, along with just about every available Michael Cimino interview well before actually trying to sit through the turgid bomb in question. But ultimately, how can one resist witnessing the epic that not only sank New Hollywood hero Michael Cimino's career, but the New Hollywood era itself?

This is of course a long-standing exaggeration, but quite a modest one at that. In the mid-80s Michael Cimino managed a brief recovery with the underrated, gritty New York crime film 'Year of the Dragon' before fading into irrelevance. His later years, despite reportedly having an entire room in his house filled with scripts, he seemed to spend turning into an androgynous cosmetic surgery subject.

So, what's the matter with Heaven's Gate. The bloated, dusty, smoky, aimless, poorly plotted, self-important heap of heavy-handed 'epicness' and shallow grandeur. Meticulously shot with a disregard for good storytelling. People mumbling their way through the movie, save for the oppressed immigrants who mostly scream in unison in that roller skating tent. These well-established reproofs are difficult to argue against.

But considering briefly our current time, didn't that sound like a pretty accurate description of the new Dune movies? Is it truly just the benefit of cutting edge special effects and a superstar like Timmy Chalamet that elevate Dune to what many people claim to be the Star Wars of our era, instead of Heaven's Gate 2.0?

Poor Heaven's gate. I agree with the sentiment in Colonel Ted's review, that there is a good political Western hiding somewhere in this "shapeless slug of a film". It just gets in its own way, particularly in the first half, by meandering in a love triangle. The poor pacing is only partly the result of the film having been cut from an insane amount of footage under serious time constraints. The characters and their relations are just not interesting.

Once we finally get to the Johnson County War in question, the film turns into an incoherent, repetitive mess of gunfire and galloping horses. Chris Walken's corny death scene is a hoot compared to the poorly edited final battle. The viewing experience isn't exactly boosted by the obvious fact that quite a few horses were badly injured during the filming.

I think the class-struggle of the Johnson County War would've lost none of its power told in a tight, to-the-point manner, without an inflated ego constantly having to underline how 'epic' everything he puts on the screen is. And, frankly, the peasants are depicted in a very condescending way here. If United Artists were looking for a true Western epic, they would've done well to funnel the cash pile the way of Sergio Leone. But, alas, Heaven's Gate is an American movie about America made by an American man...and a serious case of American excess.

...there's likely nothing else to watch. This movie is a singular joyride, an expression of the weirdo mind of Sun Ra, a highly prolific (I'm talking 50+ studio albums) jazz-man with a penchant for Ancient Egyptian turnouts and New Age-y speeches about the mystical power of music. While surveying a foreign planet, Mr. Ra lays out his goal: to evacuate the black people of Earth to come live on a planet of their own, never to be hassled by the Man again. By force, if necessary! Sorry Malcom X and MLK, Sun Ra has had it with the civil rights movement. At least we can say racial segregation has never been groovier.

Backed by visuals that would not be out of place in Kenneth Anger's 'Lucifer Rising', Space is the Place is packed wall-to-wall with hilarious dialogue and absurd details, like my favorite, Ra's Intergalactic Employment Agency. Jazz fan or not, this movie is quite simply a cultural artefact not to be missed.

A solid contender for the worst edited Italian horror film, Black Magic Rites is one of those works where it's jarringly obvious the people involved had an incredibly slim idea of what they were doing. It seems Renato Polselli rounded up his actor pals, a stash of dope and wine, as well as a few colored lights to ape Mario Bava, and trekked out to a castle to shoot a sexy occult picture, realising only upon his return that he did not have an actual movie in his hands. Undeterred, he stiched together 100 minutes of people sneaking about the castle grounds, casting suspicious glances at everything, the camera relentlessly zooming in on their faces in an unbelievable succession of redundant scenes.

The glue keeping the whole mess intact is an endless ritual for resurrecting a murdered witch, and a flashback section about said witch's demise. The oddball soundtrack is the only rewarding aspect here. If you're looking for something in line with 'Lisa and the Devil' or 'Shiver of the Vampires', prepare to be sorely disappointed.

The dawn of the 80s seemed to veer Hong Kong cinema into a frenzy, producing some of the most outrageous, lurid films of all time. These spectacles tended to take a genre-hybrid approach by blending kung fu, fantasy, horror and comedy into manic cocktails. Martial arts was no longer a question of superhuman, but of occult prowess.

Lu Chun-Ku directed two movies in 1983 with a feverish disregard for subtlety. Bastard Swordsman commences true to its title as a coked-up swordplay film but is soon sliding down the slopes of sheer madness. The plot turns into a whirlpool of deception and cartoonish combat. A central element is the Silkworm Style of kung fu. Sounds tame? That's only until it's made clear such a practice enables one not only to become practically weightless but also to shoot EXPLODING LASER BEAMS by harvesting inner powers.

The studio sets, including ancient temple grounds and nocturnal gardens with science fiction lighting, are just beautiful to look at. Everything from the garish costumes to the gleaming weapons ooze lavish charm into the fabric of Bastard Swordsman. This is a movie you simply can't help having a blast watching in its excessive glory.

An irredeemable piece of girl-on-the-run softcore swill. 'Gypsy' abandons her creepy dad and takes off to Hollywood with a biker hunk. In this city of sin they mostly pad the runtime by wandering around and acting like jackasses. All the excitement this wild LA scene has to offer them is a lame LSD orgy. After some mundane career advancements as a courtesan, Gypsy goes back to the hippies who take her to a Satanist. The film finally starts to accumulate a bit of manic energy before an abrupt, cop out ending. I guess 72 was too early to bring the sleazy potential of the premise to its proper realisation. I would steer clear off this cack and watch the offensive 'Defiance of Good' instead.

66 was the year of William Grefé's Evergladesploitation trash hits Sting of Death and Death Curse of Tartu. The national park proved an apt locale for cheap horror; most of the time the proceedings feel almost as exotic as the Filipino 'Blood Island' movies. The lush marshlands are beautifully photographed for the most part and Sting of Death even has an airboat chase scene.

Make no mistake, the film is a stinker. A research team plus a bunch of roistering college kids are terrorized by a jellyfish-man killer who looks like a garbage bin version of the mushroom people in Toho's Matango. The pacing is not as abysmal as in Death Curse of Tartu (where an unreasonably big chunk of the runtime is padded with various characters trudging through bog to suspense music), but the movie is low on thrills of any kind. It's really only worth seeing for the scenery and that bizarre jellyfish costume.

Fairly incompetent martial arts scenes unite with fantastical cheese sfx in what feels like an Indonesian version of Lucio Fulci's Conquest. The sinister synth score is easily the highlight of the picture, while not exactly fitting the milieu (save for perhaps the Crocodile Queen's sex lair). The Devil's Sword is worth a look for its trippier moments, although there's nothing here you won't find done better and wilder in Hong Kong psychotronic masterpieces like The Boxer's Omen and Five Element Ninjas, from the latter of which, you'll notice, the makers of this film blatantly lifted a detail or two.

TOTDY is extremist Refn. The story of say a 3-hour sprawling crime picture is stretched out to 12 hours full of Nic fetishes: long panning shots with not much happening, every character out to play staring contests and taking at least 10 seconds to answer simple yes-or-no questions, neon lighting and moody electronica score.

It is self-indulgent, but builds tension with awesome effect. Nearly every scene is brimming with creepy electricity and anticipation. Plus the story is much more interesting than in, say, Neon Demon or Only God Forgives where the writing was all too minimalistic. Furthermore Miles Teller, in my opinion, happens to trump Ryan Gosling in his 1-man-1-expression acting.

Let us keep in mind that the pacing here is slow enough to negate a steady diet of espresso shots and cocaine in some viewers. If nothing else, you will have found a failsafe audiovisual cure for insomnia!

Unintentionally The Mighty Gorga is the greatest Giant Ape parody of all time. Not even Jerry Zucker could write some of the gags in this film. Take for example the obviously caucasian witch doctor cursing the arrival of greedy whites in a California accent, while Gorga gazes through the bushes with a look of severe confusion. Or when the ape hurts his finger fighting a toy dinosaur and expresses this by doing what looks like a muted stand up routine for half a minute. Or when he storms the village twice during the film and we see the same exact native reaction shots both times. Or when our protagonist tells his companion to 'keep her eyes open' and we immediately cut to a shot of Gorga with his ever-open, ever-puzzled peepers. You owe yourself the joy of witnessing this turkey. Praise David L. Hewitt!

For genre enthusiasts looking for beer-and-sweat perfumed trash entertainment, Hell's Chosen Few is an option to be considered. David L. Hewitt, who is generally known for his grade Z scifi films, takes a trip into the world of outlaw biker cinema, and the result is mostly on par with other extremely low budget pleasures such as Brad F. Grinter's 'Devil Rider!', and in fact does its humble job so competently that we can't be too critical of its...well, artistic shortcomings.

The most essential feature of any biker film, drunken party sequences, are all there, taking a pretty hefty chunk of the running time, but accompanied by jukebox music just groovy enough for you to just sit there and take it all in, occasionally wondering whether that plot about saving a framed biker from the clutches of a wife-beating sheriff has been completely forgotten about. Action on the motorcycles themselves, however, is sadly absent.

The main character of the film is a Vietnam vet who joins Hell's Chosen Few with hopes of getting his innocent biker brother out of trouble, but soon finds himself more compelled to drink beers and hang out with his new girlfriend than to do anything that would help his wrongly accused family member, so not much else than debauchery and arguing with law enforcement takes place until the very end of the picture, where we are treated to an amusing, ironic ending. A worthwhile biker film!

Fellini is one of those names you hear when people make lists of the greatest or most influential filmmakers of all time, so with the advent of 100 years since his birth (an eerily Christlike celebration if you ask me) I decided to attend a screening of 8 1/2 to see what the fuss is about.

Roughly halfway through I started feeling like Alex DeLarge strapped in with his eyes forced open, waterboarded with one incomprehensible and irritating scene after another, not to mention the constant, inhuman stream of loud dialogue that makes just as little or less sense than the visual counterpart. The film plays out like a collection of deleted scenes from a dozen different soapy Italian art movies heavy on the pretense department. The butcher shop style works even less so due to an almost complete lack of humor paired with dry themes like relationships and meta-level musings on filmmaking (I dare anyone who's not a filmmaker themselves or a scholar to find this even remotely interesting).

But by far the main issue is that every character is there to drive you insane, with the exception of the main guy (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who is on the contrary far too passive and ambiguous, never having the courtesy of expressing what the hell is really going on inside his head, other than in the form of a flashback or a dream(?) skit that seem to have the pure intention of adding confusion. I think things would've turned out more tolerable had Guido the main character been the extravagant one and everyone else cryptic and suspicious. That would hardly make the movie easier to follow, but it would at least warrant the schizophrenic narrative.

Thus most likely any future mentions of Frederico Fellini will have me respond with a gagging reflex and loss of fatigue, plus audible shrieks if subjected to 8 1/2 again. I had similar thought on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Rosa (a film that made me 100 times more nauseous than Salò) and must conclude that early sixties Italian movies can go to Hell. I much prefer the ones with nudity and people getting knifed to death on-screen and in great detail.

The Skull is a little nugget of horror from the mid-60s, a decent time for Amicus Productions to say the least, pumping out beside this film a couple of very enjoyable anthology affairs also starring Mr. Cushing: Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (with Christopher Lee) and Torture Garden (with Jack Palance, the man the myth the Devil), but this picture here is pretty much Peter Cushing's show, and it's a solid one folks.

The film definitely has the feel of an Amicus anthology piece to it. A simple plot of a man who takes one step too far in his interest for the occult. This has happened before all right, and every so often by the main character acquiring an artifact of Great Evil, ignorant to its hidden powers. In the case of The Skull, this object happens to be no other than the very cranium of the late Marquis De Sade himself, an interesting fellow indeed. Christopher Maitland, an archetypal scholarly Cushing protagonist, has a penchant for keeping weird curios of this sort in his cosy tobacco-scented office/library, and cannot resist the temptation of having this ghoulish item on display.

Needless to say, the Skull still carries within it the sinister force of one of the most perverse souls in the recorded history... The film has a nice, brisk pace to it, again acting in the way of a fleshed-out entry of an Amicus anthology. Maitland's psychological deterioration before the Evil of the Skull shines toward the end of the picture, Cushing nearly reaching the hooker-strangling levels of deranged he would later showcase in Corrupted. It really is in the end his performance that allows the Skull any credentials as the ambassador of Sadism, instead of reducing it to a silly-looking Halloween prop. I mean it's really hard to make a damn skull an effective villain for your movie...at least we have a decent effort here.

Another notable feature of The Skull is a snooker game between Dracula and Van Helsing, albeit not a very good one, but believable enough with some imagination, given the topics discussed during the game are already centered around occult relics... Oh, and that spooky dream sequence deserves to be mentioned too, the atmosphere it provides is palpable! Now, if this still isn't a reason to see the film, I sure don't know what is.

This film gets a bad rep on this page here. Personally, I didn't think it was that bad at all. The main problem with End of the World (as every other review lets you know) is perhaps the movie's rudimentary script and the lack of trying to keep its audience stimulated. Though I do think it also works to the film's advantage.

The absence of action scenes and special effects combined with the often abysmal lighting creates a pretty cool ominous atmosphere. The soundtrack plays a big part here; without the dark, droning electronic ambiance and sound effects this movie would surely turn to a chore to sit through.

But there I was, end credits rolling, wide-awake and alert. In retrospect, a lot of the scenes were absolutely pointless, not bringing the ultra-simple plot forward (the story is seriously that of a 30-minute short film). Don't expect interesting characters, escaping tidal waves, thrilling suspense, lasers.... Here's what you get: a few explosions, stock footage and a cool set towards the end of the film. Deal with it, or go watch Star Wars.

If you don't mind low-key cinema, give End of the World a try. A lot of people here seemed to be expecting a disaster movie, given the title. This is essentially a movie that does not care about your thirst for vibrant cinema. It's cheap 70s science fiction. Oh yeah, and Christopher Lee is great as always!

Surely one of '73's horror highlights, Joe D'Amato's bizarre "Death Smiles on a Murderer" sees the infamous porn/gore director flirting with ethereal giallo atmospheres rather than the smutty, sometimes gut-wrenching delights he would later build his career around. Don't fool yourself, the film is still very much a heavy, nasty piece of work. The packaging however, is more artsy and moody than for instance his famously gritty late-seventies landmark, Buio Omega.

Still obviously less established in the gore department, the essence of "Death Smiles..." is its baffling plot, psychological terror and the extremely effective soundtrack. Shout-out to Berto Pisano! But when violence occurs, don't dare think it's going to be, shall we say, liquid only!

The direction is experimental to say the least. Weird angles, weird lenses, weird editing, weirdly edited staring scenes etc. But I have to say, it all works out! The experimentation complements the story that, I'm going to guess, not all makers of the film had a cohesive idea of. Much less the viewers.

The gist of it, however, involves such things as reanimation, revenge, off-beat romance, another off-beat romance, and a confused detective trying to sort out all of this. Ewa Aulin is great as the mysterious Greta, and the handsome early-seventies Klaus Kinski is an absolute delight to watch. Nosferatu he ain't.

"Death Smiles on a Murderer" is essentially a Joe D'Amato movie for giallo fans. Gore-hounds are likely to fall asleep. Friends of strange Euro-horror, rejoice!

Maybe one of the saddest things a human being can do is to watch a movie like "SS Experiment Love Camp" and criticize it. It's like what did you expect? I understand it when people analyze and discuss compelling works of film like "Apocalypse, Now", but the fact that you with your own will sit through a nazisploitation piece of litter such as this, and have the balls to talk crap on top of it? Oh man, that's ridiculous. And the fact that I'm making an effort to write about this 1976 video nasty, proves that I'm one of these freaks.

As one might suspect, the title gives away everything you possibly need to know. It's exactly what it says. Some people might confuse this to an actual porn feature in whatever weird store that holds this thing in their shelves, but it's a lot lower than that. There are many many naked chicks and almost every scene introduces a pair of genuine POW tits, but the sex/orgy scenes deliver nothing more than the usual sleazy scrubbing that goes on just so they can reach a full feature length.

There's basically four sections to this film: soft-core eroticism, surgical scenes to show some gory guts, female torture scenes, and pointless dialogue about the cunning plans of the Nazis. It's like these ingredients were put in a blender to produce an extra sloppy script. And yes, there is a romance between one of the Nazis and a prisoner. Who would have thought?

Many people find "SS Experiment Love Camp" boring, and that's because it is boring. Even the most deviant scenes aren't much anything to behold. Everything relies merely on naked breasts and screaming. Fans of gore will be disappointed and bored to death, while woman haters get what they want. God forbid if a feminist ever gets near this thing. That's also the beauty of exploitation cinema; most of the stuff that was produced in the 70s alone would never get into a theater these days.

This movie is bad. Watch it if you're a weird exploitation buff like me who just can't keep away from this crap. Also mandatory for video nasty perfectionists, all sorts of psychos, and SSadists. If some mistake this to a cheesy "so-bad-it's-good" flick, they have made a mistake that will probably just leave a bad taste in their mouths.

Never would've imagined that a sequel to a movie like Bronx Warriors could be any good, but this film turned out to be a great piece of work.

This film lacks the gangs and the motorcycles from the first movie, but it fills those gaps with loads of very satisfying shooting action. The number of explosions are upped radically. Cars, buildings and flamethrower tanks went "boom" quite a few times during the film. And believe me, the body count is off the charts.

If you like all the classic 80s action films, i think you'll find Escape From The Bronx really entertaining. This movie reeks of Mad Max and The Warriors. Bronx is an apocalyptic battlefield, a real concrete jungle where corporate spacesuit exterminators get their asses kicked by good ol' Trash and his new pals.

An expedition team investigating a planet faces terror as a woman on the team gets raped by an alien (with something that looked like a plastic pipe filled with green ooze) and starts killing her colleagues. The team will have a hard time surviving. After all it's a pregnant woman who's hunting them down!

Being an 80s sci-fi movie, there has to be a space bunker full of lights, buttons, monitors and fancy space suits. They did some fine work with the backgrounds, and no fog machines were spared. There's also explosions. Yay!

This movie is pretty dumb in many ways but hey, turn your brain down and enjoy the violence and cheese this movie has to offer. It can be entertaining.