Amazon is having a huge DVD sale for January 2010:
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We watch a lot of bad movies. Some are good, most are bad, and some are so bad they are funny (I laughed the whole way through 2012). I expected Arachnia to fall into the “bad” category. I was surprised to discover that Arachnia is actually a fun, low-budget monster movie.
The monsters in Arachnia are large spider-like stop-motion creations, like something from the 1950s. Other than a lack of color (the monsters are uniformly grey-brown), the stop-motion effects are reasonably well done for a low budget movie. The characters are distinctive, the acting is not too shabby, and the writing is actually pretty good. We chuckled several times, not just at the movie, but with the movie. There are even a few nude scenes (which I like, in principle), but rather than the awkward, uncomfortable to watch, overtly sexual and yet completely non-erotic scenes you get in movies like Final Examination, Arachnia has a sense of innocent fun. One of the times we laughed was actually during one of the nude scenes, and this was not a “laughing because it is so bad” moment, but a moment of intentional humor. How rare that is!
So, for monsters, humor, and fun nudes scenes, I give this movie four out of five stars.
Trivia: Arachnia was made by Edgewood Studios, the same Vermont folks who gave us Time Chasers.
We watch a lot of movies. Most of them are not very good. We recently saw a Belgian-French-German movie called Daughters of Darkness, which was really quite good. Images has a pretty good review of it.
I am watching the special features on the “Revenge of The Sith” DVD, the third of the second set of Star Wars sequels.
People in the special features keep referring to how Lucas doesn’t know what he wants until he sees it, and that they just keep generating scenes and hope that eventually Lucas will string the pieces together to make a movie. “That’s what it’s like to work with George.” They come right out and say this, over and over.
He even says it, although he phrases it differently.
It’s hilarious to hear George Lucas talking about how if he had more control over Star Wars (the first movie), that X would have been Y, and W would have been Z, etc. Essentially, that if he’d had his way, Darth Vader would have been a huge puss all along and that Star Wars would have sucked.
How freaking delusional can one person be?
Happy New Year!
My sweetie and I spent New Year’s Eve at the Keswick Theatre near Philadelphia, seeing a three-movie marathon live performance of Cinematic Titanic. In the tradition of getting ram chips by saying good things and bad things about a movie, here goes!
Good thing: The Keswick Theatre is really nice. It’s probably the fourth or fifth nicest antique theatre in which I have seen a movie.
Bad thing: Being in a chair designed for someone born in the 1800s, between people whose figures are, shall we say, generous.
Good thing: Seeing folks from MST3K perform live! Whoo hoo! We had seen Mary Jo and Mike at GenCon back in the early 1990s, but this was even better.
Bad thing: Trace and Joel apparently have the same tailor.
Good thing: Trace still does a killer Barney Fife impression.
Bad thing: Joel’s “Gilbert Gottfried” internal monologues and “high pitched voice on the other end of the phone” routines weren’t funny in 1990, and still aren’t.
Good thing: The brothers on one side of us (shout out to Mike and Andrew! Happy new year!) were really friendly and fun to talk to.
Bad thing: The guy on the other side was alone, not interested in talking, and kept fiddling with his huge backpack (why? I never saw him take anything out of it or put anything into it — weird).
Good thing: Three twisted films, two of which I had never seen, and the third which was weird enough that I saw new weirdness even though I’d seen the film before. Good choices!
Bad thing: The aspect ratio was set incorrectly for the first movie (even though I saw them trying to correct it at the beginning — they left it distorted! Why?!), and the second movie was cropped to force it into a 4:3 aspect ratio, which ruined at least one joke. I don’t know why this does not bother other people as much as it does me, or why it is so difficult for people to figure out what seems so absurdly simple. Look, it does not matter what the shape of the screen is: adjust the aspect ratio until you see the whole image, without distortion. Don’t crop it, and don’t squeeze it in, out, up, or down to fit some arbitrary shape. Is that so freaking hard?
Good thing: Spending New Year’s Eve doing something completely new and different, and not being nauseous the next morning and wondering what happened after that third round of “candy corn” shots!
My sweetie and I spent our Christmas Eve watching a movie called Zombie Strippers, which is exactly what it sounds like.
I admit I had very low expectations from Zombie Strippers. I have recently seen a lot of bad attempts at horror-comedy, such as the atrocious Splatter Beach, and I expected no better from Zombie Strippers. To my surprise, it was funny, and gory, and had decent acting (far above par for the genre), and good writing, and the special effects were inventive and well done. In fact, the only thing that prevents it from being classified along with such classics like Evil Dead and Re-Animator is that there is no single standout performance (like Bruce Campbell or Jeffrey Combs in the aforementioned classics). But really, that’s a faint criticism. Zombie Strippers is probably the best horror movie I have seen in quite a while, and the best horror comedy I have seen in a very, very long time.
I have been wanting to make a music video using World Of Warcraft for a long time. I purchased a program called FRAPS to do the image capture, and started sketching out a storyboard.
Then I saw this: I’m So Sick, a machinima by Baron Soosdon.
I am blown away… and humbled. There is no way I could even approach something like this.
If you get sound and no video, you may need to install come codecs.
I spent some time today piecing together the cinematic history of Godzilla. I have about a dozen Godzilla movies on DVD. Most are available in English. A few are not. Some were brutally mangled for US release, but I think many of those have since been re-released by distributors that actually care about the film (most notably Gojira and Godzilla Raids Again).
With that in mind, I have compiled a list of the Godzilla films and what I consider to be the important Godzilla-related films (I included Rodan, for example, but I did not include movies like War of the Gargantuas, which are ostensibly set in the same universe but which never cross over with Godzilla), and linked them to what I consider the best versions of those films on DVD (at the time I made this list, anyway — Classic Media is doing a great job resurrecting these). Unfortunately, some are not yet available on DVD in the USA.
I hope that other people find this list useful.
Showa era
Heisei era
The American knock-off
Millennium era
“There’s no way I would be involved in a sequel or prequel,” said director Zack Snyder, who turned the graphic novel “300″ into a 2007 blockbuster.
“Will they make one? I have no idea how you would. The work is the work. This movie is about ideas. Anything else you would do, if you did a sequel to it, misses the point entirely of what ‘Watchmen’ is,” he said.
That didn’t stop them from making sequels to Highlander and The Matrix.
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Blackmoor Vituperative