lastgoldrush Reviews

Blood of the Chupacabras (2005)

Mrs. Grundy's 4th grade homeroom class makes a movie

[1/10 · 29 November 2008]

I'm glad that chupacabra movies have become their own genre. Are there enough chupacabra movies already in existence? Obviously, Mr. Mumm did not think so, since this is the second one he has made. Unfortunately, there is not very much chupacabra in this chupacabra movie. Mostly it's about sweaty guys yelling at each other and some kidnappers and a detective and people who die in a barn. The chupacabra prowls around and shows up at random moments of CGI tragedy. He usually looks like a large falafel with teeth and wings, and the actors sound like they're from a society that punishes emotion with thumbscrews and water torture. Oh, and when we finally see the chupacabra walk, he looks like he is in some form of rectal pain, because he makes these sad, clenched-buttcheek little steps.

The song that plays over the end credits is like Geddy Lee got drunk and sniffed some ammonia and recorded the sounds he made thereafter.

Beowulf (1999)

What is movie green for to crazy maker mother?!

[2/10 · 9 July 2008]

What. Uh...

This movie is so dissociative and messed up that I literally lost a bit of my sanity after it was over. I will never be the same person again. I'm trying to put my finger on what, exactly, is so completely insane about it... It's not just the hilarious techno music, or the "outside of time" medieval/Blade Runner/wild west/Highlander setting, or the weird CGI "Grendel" monster that looks like a man made out of animated sausages, or even the "Grendel's mother" monster, which looks like some Alabama table-dancer who grew claws and tentacles when she stayed in the tanning bed too long. All of those things are weird, but what's really the strangest thing in this movie is the acting. I simply can't explain. This script is obviously, hellishly silly, but the actors exude deadly seriousness through it all. Lambert is always weird, and usually kind of boring, but for this one he's gone into Dolph Lundgrin territory: I can't help but just start laughing every time he talks.

I will give this movie some credit for being completely scatter-brained and crazy as opposed to conservative and boring. I'll always take a bizarre disaster of a film over an utterly mediocre one.

Warning: if you are planning on watching Christopher Lambert as Beowulf, be prepared to spend several hours thereafter wandering the streets in some kind of nightmarish, hyperactive-catatonic daze. It's true. When I was done with my Beowulf spirit journey, I woke up in the middle of the Siberian tundra in a puddle of blood and milk. There was a dead wolf lying next to me, and I later found I had a handful of human teeth in my shirt pocket. My VHS copy of Beowulf was sitting on a hastily-constructed stone altar nearby, enshrined with candles and wilted flowers. The tape told me to walk. I rose and I walked.

Dragon Wars: D-War (2007)

D-War: Dragon Wars... A movie as good as its title.

[1/10 · 25 September 2007]

Okay, I don't want to start off on the wrong foot, so here is the verdict: You must go see D-War in theaters. Maybe more than once.

This is one of the worst big-budget movies I have ever seen. Yes, it is worse than Van Helsing, though the creature CG looks a good bit better. This is worse than Armageddon. You won't believe it until you see it, but once you finally do see it, you will be so happy. The film starts off with a voice-over telling you a clumsily-worded legend. Then a hunky young reporter goes to investigate a scene of unexplained destruction in the middle of a city (obviously, we assume, caused by a dragon). He stands in front of a camera and talks about the incident, and he makes borderline metaphysical leaps of logic, such as, "The damage was so extensive that there are no eye-witnesses." ...? Then he sees a garbage can lid that is supposed to be a dragon scale. This causes him to suddenly remember when he was a child and Robert Forster told him a long story about how it was destiny to save the world. This story, at one point, takes the movie into four layers of flashback. I'm not kidding - a flashback within a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. This story also comes with a long list of vocabulary that you are expected to learn and remember for the rest of the movie. Nobody does. More generic plot unfolds. We are introduced to the movie's villain when there is a steady shot of a sidewalk and the side of a building, and he just walks into the frame, dressed like Darth Maul. Then he walks through a wall.

Anyway, this movie sucks and is hilarious. People are arguing whether an Uwe Boll comparison is apt. Here's how I see it: no, it's not quite as bad as Uwe Boll. But it's close. The high-rent CGI and action sequences save this movie from the levels of degradation and shame that we have come to expect out of Dr. Boll. However, if you were to take away this movie's budget, I think you would basically have Alone in the Dark, except a little less confusing. At the same time, this movie has a different tone of badness. I enjoy all of the inherent hilarity in Uwe Boll's style of stupidity, but for some reason, I don't find myself feeling good about it. There is something reprehensible at the core of an Uwe Boll film, even though it may be funny to watch. D-War, on the other hand, has something positively cute at its core. D-War does make me feel good. This movie is adorably bad. It's like a kitten that you have to squirt with a spray-bottle because it keeps trying to get on the kitchen table.

So, anyway, I couldn't honestly give it more than one star, because one star is what I think it deserves, but you should see it if you can. Get your friends together, get drunk, and go absorb.

Final Stab (2001 Video)

well-groomed actors recite empty dialogue and die from minor wounds

[1/10 · 24 September 2006]

This is one of those pitiful "horror" films that seems like it came together as an excuse to encapsulate a few sex scenes, yet there are no sex scenes in the movie. This leaves you with a movie full of trendy-looking people who act and talk in ways that are neither stylistic nor realistic.

The killer in this movie is more funny than scary. His mask has this big goofy grin and a bald head; it looks like they gave him a William Frawley mask and spray-painted it blue. During most of the murder scenes, he appears either to stab someone in a non-fatal part of the body or inflict a very shallow wound. In either case, the person dies instantly. The funniest parts feature glimpses of the killer running around in the woods by himself - without anywhere to be, really. This makes the viewer wonder if he is just doing the murder spree thing for the exercise.

The end makes a very poor attempt to pull off a "who is the real killer?" scene, as in "Scream." This may have something to do with this movie being optioned as a Scream sequel? The alternate titles suggest that. Either way, it's self-conscious of the horror genre, but only in a really embarrassing way.

All that said, if you like bad horror for the laughs, this one is pretty prime. Try to avoid spending money to obtain it.

Demonicus (2001)

Why do you keep putting the death hat on?

[1/10 · 1 June 2006]

This movie is about Tyrannus, a gladiator who is brought back from the dead to summon Tyrannus, a gladiator who must be brought back from the dead. Tyrannus, we learn after about an hour, is also called Demonicus. This adds much needed depth to the screenplay and calls into question our assumptions about identity, psychology and ourselves.

The spirit of Tyrannus accomplishes his little to-do list (killing some people and saying repetitive phrases in Latin) by possessing the body of a college guy. He uses a magic mind-control helmet to do this, which the college boy willingly puts on his head, and then at several points in the movie, takes off and puts back on.

Maria performs oral sex on a poor man's Sean Willian Scott, and Tyrannus wears the Rollerball glove. Tyrannus has his own green backlighting for no reason, and has apparently been sitting next to CG fire in an ancient concrete tunnel for centuries like this. Utter misfortune.

This movie is empty and will hurt you. See it.

The Gingerdead Man (2005)

Somehow, they made this boring

[1/10 · 21 March 2006]

I don't know how they did it, but they did. You have a killer cookie, the insane-as-hell Gary Busey and a bizarre cage-wrestling personality all in the same movie, and it is somehow STILL boring. This is not one tenth of the ridiculous cheese-festival it should be. Nothing much happens, Gary Busey has like less than ten lines, and the only person I remember him actually successfully killing (spoiler, whatever) was that old guy whom he hits in the knees with a car (but how does he reach the gas pedal?).

Pure wasted potential. A more interesting movie would just be a documentary on how Gary Busey behaved on the set. His feature billing here is misleading and dumb. This is below b-movie humor; this film just kind of melts you until you drip out of your seat and dream about getting your money back.

Mayhem (1986)

and then comes the hurting

[1/10 · 6 December 2005]

What is this? I think they didn't have a script when they began shooting this film - they just made it up as they went along. It certainly feels that way, since the movie doesn't really seem to follow the normal structure of one event leading to another, but rather shows us endless footage of Dino and Ziggy eating in like nine different restaurants and occasionally killing some people or arguing about health habits.

And then come the flashbacks... Oh my God, Dino's flashbacks... That soft lens and generic flashback music did its job, because otherwise, with such inept segues, I wouldn't have known what was going on at all. Meanwhile, the sequences themselves are rather nauseating tradeoffs between "romantic" interplay (Dino looks like a caveman and his wife looks like a hooker) and horrible acts of violence. Then, uh, the flashbacks kind of turn into fantasies and they mix together. It's weird.

And then comes the pointlessness, which is about 90% of the movie. I'd say throughout the course of it, there's at least a solid 10 minutes of simply watching Dino walk around in his house, shave, read, PAINT (he's a sensitive hit-man, who PAINTS), then wander around downtown L.A. and sit in alleyways. Then we watch Ziggy do similar things... at least a good 10 minutes of him going to nudie bars and porno movies and playing arcade games.

And then comes the ridiculous violence, which is way overdone.

And then comes the hurting. It was a pleasant surprise when my friend rescued this from a local bargain bin that we regularly scour for schlock. It's maybe the worst movie to come out of the 80's. Wow.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997)

this made my brain bleed

[1/10 · 20 November 2005]

Oh man... and people thought Mortal Kombat 1 was bad. Annihilation makes MK1 look like Schindler's List. This movie is a courageous foray into the nightmarish underworld of utter mindlessness. I only suspend my disbelief so much - then I start becoming frustrated and asking questions like: How the heck does somebody travel through the molten core of the earth in a sailing American Gladiators ball? There is no wind underground. Not even in Raiden's magical tunnels, dude. Sorry. I understand how lots of movies are only capsules for their fight scenes, and I'm okay with that, but the stipulation is that the fight scenes have to be at least kind of cool.

I think that this movie may have hurt my physical body. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow.

Alone in the Dark (2005)

causality?

[1/10 · 20 November 2005]

So I'll admit it: I love House of the Dead.

House was awful. One of the worst movies I've ever seen (which really means something when I say it). It was awful, and because of the sheer brilliance of its tumbling ineptitude, I loved it. I laughed painfully hard. Needless to say, my expectations for Alone in the Dark were low (or high... however you would classify it).

I was sorely disappointed. Alone in the Dark was a frantic, CGI-driven mess that delivered very little of the active humor that made House wonderful. The production value was higher here, so some of the scenes actually looked pretty good, but none of that was enough to rescue the film from its ADD storyline.

The movie begins with a weird, crawling text legend that is both dragged across the screen (Star Wars style) and read aloud to you. I'm... trying to remember what it said, but nothing is really coming to mind. Something about artifacts and ancient evils. And also an ancient tribe, which the movie claims was the first ever to value gold. That makes them pretty flippin old. This text crawl seems to be a metaphor for the film in general, which was mostly just weird, CGI-monster-related violence that I mostly couldn't figure out the reason for. I think, basically, there were all these monsters underground, and... some guy with gray hair wanted to let them out so he could... I dunno, rule the world or something (I don't really know how that works). Tara Reid pretends to be a scientist by putting on glasses and using a computer program that does nondescript scientific things (like it shows this object sitting on her desk as a green polygon lattice... I guess that helps her somehow). Then Christian Slater fights some dudes and he and Tara Reid have sex. Then some people fight more monsters, and uh, there are like some kind of zombies, too.

You get the idea. I'm not really sure how a lot of the things that happened in this movie were related, or what a lot of characters' motivations were for doing what they did.

I guess there were some laughs that came out of this thing - most of them related to its disjointed, confusing plot. Every time one of us asked what was going on or why somebody was doing something or how the characters got where they were, we chuckled a bit. I guess it could be turned into a drinking game - take a drink every time someone vocalizes justified confusion. Apparently the filmmakers felt their art was above the constraints of causality.

Now I'm actually kind of torn on whether I would recommend it for comedy value. It's like a fever-induced nightmare, except not scary.

Ah, oh well. See it anyway. Contribute to the "Pay Uwe Boll to Waste Miles of Film for Our Overall Benefit" fund. It's a good cause.

Vampiyaz (2004 Video)

utter discomfort (SPOILERS, like it matters...)

[1/10 · 8 November 2005]

This movie hurts the viewer in a unique and special way. Sure, we got some laughs out of it, but honestly, I will never heal. I believe the fight scenes, which somehow make live action video look like stop motion animation, are the undisputed highlight. If you'll notice, on second viewing, right after he gets out of jail Jakeem doesn't even have to look up the number for the hookers - he must have memorized it before his eight (sometimes seven) years in the joint. The video quality is worthy of a Full Moon picture, and the lighting worthy of a karaoke bar.

Why is the guy with the BB gun wearing a giant baby suit? Utter misfortune. Weap for us.