Screenhead

I had to admit, that when I found the short film One Missed Call on YouTube, my eyebrow arched in surprise. Oh yes.  It AUDIBLY arched.  A premise like this didn’t come along every day.

After all, I don’t know the last time I’ve seen a movie about a film critic who went a little too far lambasting a film and instead got his.  And believe me, I’m very much aware of the irony involved with the idea that I’m reviewing a movie about a film critic who went too far.

But the question is, does the short itself live up to the premise?

Sadly, no.

I’ll admit that this is actually hilarious in several points.  Alexander Carneiro is easily one of the worst film critics I’ve ever seen.  Large portions of the dialogue are devoted to saying the same thing over and over again.  Their Michael Jackson character would be unidentifiable if it weren’t for the fact that they clearly identify him, in film, as such.

But considering that this is some dork cutting a movie in what looks like his parents’ house with a camcorder and a couple quick camera changes, some allowances need to be made.  Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale begrudgingly hands out a four out of ten to this huge waste of a great idea.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Low-budget awesome, but still awesome.

And you’ll be amazed how the criminal element in the supposedly gun-free country manages to get their hands on literally all kinds of armament, up to and including an Uzi.

Ten Dead Men deals with Ryan, the mostly mute former henchman of a criminal syndicate.  Ryan is the syndicate’s gifted assassin who, one day, decides he’s going to pack it in for the simple life as the male half of a young couple.  Dinner parties, white sheets, occasional vacations in the sun…these things seem pretty ideal for Ryan until one day he helps an old friend…who’s double crossed the syndicate.

Directly after, the syndicate then killed Ryan’s lovely young girlfriend, and very nearly Ryan too.  So now Ryan has to set out to get his revenge on the ten men who took his life away.  Ten men had to pay…and when you find out what happens to them, you’ll be amazed.

Despite the fact that Ten Dead Men is extremely low budget, possibly owing to the fact that they got Doug Bradley–Pinhead himself–to serve as the film’s narrator, you’re going to find that Ten Dead Men has a great many satisfying twists involved with it.  In fact, the greatest secret of all is the identity of the tenth person on Ryan’s murder list.  I won’t tell you who it is, but I will tell you that it’ll be just plain old amazing.

And plain old amazing is an excellent descriptor.  I usually enjoy British gangster films–they have a certain charm to them that you can’t get anywhere else.  They have the violence and action you expect, but they also bring in some comic relief, too–plus the occasional surprise or two.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Ten Dead Men a high-grade nine out of ten.  If they’d had a proper budget, chances are this would blow Snatch out of the WATER.  It’s an excellent piece that’ll hold your interest all the way through, and any action buff will love having it in their library.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Back when I was first getting started in movie review, the first company I managed to partner with–that is, convince that I was a sufficiently big deal to send movies to in order to review–was The Asylum.  And back in those long ago days, you could count on The Asylum to take chances and show an unusual amount of spine for an industry that so often imitates itself.

But that hasn’t been the case lately…The Asylum went the way of the so-called “mockbuster”, or as I was calling them for the longest time, Asylumized movies.  They’d take whatever was big in the theatres–or would likely be big–retool it a bit and release it.  For instance, ahead of the first Transformers movie, The Asylum released Transmorphers.  When A Stranger Calls became When A Killer Calls, and so on right down the line.  Some of them have been better than others, and some have just plain old been complete wastes of DVD plastic.

Now, we have The Terminators, released just around the same time as Terminator: Salvation.  How will it fare?  Let’s find out.

This time, The Terminators assumes a future in which the race of cyborgs (they really seem more like androids or possibly outright robots–admittedly it’s a fine distinction but a relevant one nonetheless) rises up against their human masters for little or no stated reason (what, did they just get sick of working for the man?) and ran amok in an orgy of bloody excess and violence.  All that’s left to take on the so-called TRs is a handful of humans that form the human resistance against the TR hordes.

On the one hand, this movie doesn’t have a bad storyline–it’s kind of interesting to watch relatively low-tech humans tackle these bulked-up androids with not that much better hardware than humans.  It has a certain sort of compelling action / sci-fi feel to it that keeps it interesting.  Plus, you’re hoping as you go through the movie that you’ll get a little more explanation as to just what the deuce is actually going on around here.

On the other hand, meanwhile, this is clearly a low-budget spectacular, and science fiction is NOT the job to do on a low budget.  The result will be that a lot of things that probably should have happened will not–for instance, a handful of human survivors fires a whole mess of ammo into a TR unit, the TR is clearly hit.  Clinking and pinging sounds, along with flashes of white denoting impact, are both clearly seen and heard.  Yet, somehow, the very next shot shows that the TR is clearly unscathed.  And I mean “unscathed”–when a Terminator took a round, there would be a hole in the synthetic skin, probably a little blood.  The TR, meanwhile, takes not even a scratch or a smudge of ash from the impact.

The worst of it is, it didn’t even NEED to be a Terminator hanger-on.  It does all right by itself.  Yeah, sure, it’s a low-budget sci-fi epic, which is one of the worst kinds, but it’s still a fairly compelling action piece.  If someone had called this “Rage of the Autodroids” or some such potboiler nightmare, it’d be no less valid.    No one needed to tie this in to the Terminator franchise.

The Terminators walks away with a six out of ten:  it does do surprisingly well for a low-budget sci-fi epic, but it definitely didn’t factor in its limitations beforehand.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Five Fingers is the kind of movie that must be seen to be believed, and once it is seen, cannot help but be appreciated.  This is a wildly clever title that will do downright amazing things, if you’re willing to spend about two thirds of it completely in the dark.

Basically, it’s about a young Dutch pianist named Martijn who’s going to Morocco to set up a food program.  On the way there, he’s shot full of some random drug, his traveling companion is shot, and he’s forced into some kind of interrogation / mind game in which he’s out to not only survive, but also learn his captor’s true objectives and also escape, if he can.

Five Fingers will be an extremely, EXTREMELY deliberate movie, giving away only tiny bits of the plot at any given time.  They will take an excruciatingly long time going over it all, and they will only toss out a tiny bit after a good long sequence has passed.

Oh, and there’s a really creepy reason they call it “Five Fingers”.  Trust me on that one, it’s creepy.

It’s hard to say much of anything about a movie like this.  It will require great focus to get anything out of it because they’ll be advancing the plot in tiny, tiny chunks at a time, surrounding it with alternating sequences of tedium and brutality.  It’s not even organized the way a standard narrative would be, with the backstory in one solid mass somewhere near the beginning, and then the remaining events of the narrative proceeding outward from there.  But in Five Fingers, we get the backstory in little bits at a time, pieces and pieces here and there, and the story they form is downright amazing.  You will be in suspense for literally most of the film.

By the time you get to the end of this monster, you’re going to be absolutely amazed by what has just happened.  The concept is just mind-boggling in its complexity.  I’m still amazed by the sheer number of twists the last fifteen minutes represented.  Even after seeing it through, they sprung a trap on me the likes of which I’d never seen before.  I’m repeating the word “amazed” a lot here because I just plain old AM AMAZED by this.

The sheer minimalism of this one is what’s doubly disconcerting–they did this with a cast of about half a dozen speaking roles and most of it was shot in what might have been an abandoned steel mill.    They’ve done so much with comparatively little that, looking at some hundred million dollar piece of summer movie excess almost leaves me feeling bloated and revolted by comparison.

Seriously, if you want to see what just a little bit can do, get your hands on a copy of Five Fingers.  This will prove the immense value of a good script.  There are virtually no special effects in this–a few squibs and blood packs, that’s really about it.  There are no huge set pieces, no expensive backdrops, just the kind of thing that could probably be done on the strength of an everyday consumer credit card.

Five Fingers may be one of the biggest surprises of the year, and if you want to see what kind of surprises can hit you when you’re not looking, run out and get one of these amazingly clever pieces.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Folks, if you want the very latest in groundbreaking, chance-taking, movie making joy, you’re not going to go to the theatre.  You’re going to go to the video store or somewhere similar.  And today, I’m going to be filling you in on one of the biggest little movies that hasn’t even managed to come out yet.  That’s right–you’re getting a really, really, REALLY advance sneak peek at Interplanetary, the second feature-length film from the guys out at Crewless Productions.

In case you’re not already familiar with these guys–and you should be, believe me–they were the bunch behind Hide And Creep, perhaps the first and only movie to feature a video store clerk as a romantic male lead.    Interplanetary brings that special blend of comedy, suspense, action and sheer low-budget antics to a new frontier this time, science fiction.

In Interplanetary, the Interplanetary Corporation has set up a base on the surface of Mars, for reasons that can only be described as poorly explained.    But this really isn’t the point, as the crew of the Interplanetary Corporation live and work on Mars, and are convinced that they’re the only ones on the planet…at least, until someone takes a rocket launcher to Mars Base Two.  Now the folks at Interplanetary  are neck-deep in mysteries like:

1. Who’s shooting at us?

2. What’s that alien monstrosity that keeps killing us off?

3. Does any of this have anything to do with the fossil we found?

4. Did you get that memo I sent you about the TPS reports?

Before you start thinking that ’s from the wrong movie, you’re right, but not as right as you think.  See, the more I watched Interplanetary, the more I was convinced that it was a weird cross between Total Recall and Office Space.  The Interplanetary Corporation contains a very large and very rigid bureaucracy, and the corporate hierarchy is so ingrained in its workers–at least its middle managers, who are in charge of the base–that they consult company policy manuals for instructions on how to react to hostage situations.  Even when they’re the ones being taken hostage.

This mix is incredibly hard to maintain even under normal circumstances, but doubly hard considering that Interplanetary will actually take itself seriously the whole time.  Yes, there are plenty of killer jokes in here–a short-range spacecraft is dubbed the Hesperus–and there are also more than a few good doses of suspense and action too.  There’s a little bit of something for just about everybody in Interplanetary,  and that’s going to make this a movie superior to a lot of its kind.

There will even be a slew of surprises to be had here–the ending must be seen to be believed–and they’ll be inserted at random throughout the proceedings just to keep things even more interesting.

For those of you who think that science fiction can only be good with A-list stars and an A-list budget, I’m profoundly honored to offer up Interplanetary, a move that will prove you wrong by every measure possible.  In fact, if you’re any kind of science fiction fan at all, this will just prove to be entirely too good to miss.

Popularity: unranked [?]

It’s not too hard to say that Bruce Campbell’s career has been something of a flaming wreckage for the last few years now.  In fact, that’s almost being charitable.  With a series of horrendous B-movies filmed in far-off places like Bulgaria, and a downright depressing advertising campaign for Old Spice, and even a stint on the worst list a celebrity can occupy, Film Threat’s Frigid Fifty, the legendary Campbell’s career was downright toxic.

Longtime fans even began to wonder if he could ever recover, or if he’d be doomed to pointlessness and obscurity forever.  Well, I’ll tell you this much, folks–the Bruce is back.

It’s called My Name Is Bruce, and it’s a rollicking series of fourth wall violations and monster-battling fun in the grandest Bruce Campbell tradition.  Bruce Campbell plays himself, an out-of-shape, out-of-work, out-of-luck has-been living in a run-down trailer somewhere within driving distance of the town of Gold Lick.  And Gold Lick’s got some serious problems–notably, an abandoned Chinese graveyard protected by the Chinese god of war, death and bean curd, Guan Di.  Anyway, as is the standard for movies like this, a group of horny, promiscuous teens break into said graveyard and accidentally release Guan Di, who promptly goes on a killing spree.  It’s now up to Bruce Campbell, legendary B-movie actor, to bravely sally forth (and I managed to say it first try, too!) and save the town of Gold Lick.

An action-packed laugh riot with lots of blood splatter and jokes, My Name Is Bruce may well be Bruce Campbell’s best movie in the last five years.  That’s not exactly a tough goal to reach, but still, credit where credit is due.  It’s nice to see Bruce back in proper roles again, allowed to reach that old Campbellian standard that he himself created.  There will even be inside jokes for those who remember the really old-school Campbell work.  For instance, when Bruce goes for the quarter, see if you don’t recognize that.  I’m not going to spoiler–just telling you what to watch for.

What’s really interesting about this one is that it’s easily as low-budget as the rest of Campbell’s current body of work.  I seriously doubt they spent a whole lot more on this one than they did on The Man With The Screaming Brain.  And yet they got so much more out of it.  Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that this was DIRECTED by Campbell just as much as him starring in it.  Maybe, with him handling direction, production AND acting duties he got clear of a lot of executive meddling.

Maybe…just maybe…it wasn’t Bruce’s career that went south.  Maybe he was just being misused.

Bruce Campbell’s career has taken a lot of abuse over the years, and mostly from disgruntled fans like myself who got sick of waiting for him to do something ENTERTAINING again while he launched off on a series of idiotic, asinine roles that he was clearly doing for a paycheck.  My Name Is Bruce, meanwhile, watches almost like old Bruce Campbell did.  And that’s a welcome surprise.

Popularity: 1% [?]