I'm Not There

The character of man is such a shiftable thing. Seeing as how the Harvest Moon is tonight, I had to watch  The Wolfman earlier today.  Ever since I started screening these movies, this one has been calling my name and tonight was the perfect night.  I've heard both good and bad reactions to this and the bad are mostly trolls and nerdy fanboys who just don't want to see change and there is no version of this movie that would appease them.  This phenomenon has and is still plaguing all of Universal's monster remakes in their Dark Universe.  The "fans" who aren't happy are the loudest and get the most attention.  On the other hand, if Universal hadn't stopped caring about their monster properties and did something with them prior to these remakes, it might be a different story.  It's like having an older cousin that everyone praises but you've never met and then one random day you meet and are expected to get along great.  NOt gonna happen....

(Predator Noise) I was debating whether to classify this as horror or simply an action/suspense film and ultimately decided it belongs to the horror genre.  Why?  Firstly, the obvious minorities are the first ones to die. Furthermore, the predators are like serial killers silently stalking their prey until they catch them and rip their spine out or kill them in bloody gory ways.  If Saw can do this and get away with it being called horror because they put in a few jump scares, then this movie is fair game too. I was told this was the better of the Predator sequels and I will say that this is an absolute factual statement.  However, I have not seen any of the sequels except for Alien Vs Predator which I thought was ok but this movie definitely surpasses it.  There is a lot of action and intense moments that will make this movie enjoyable for anyone that is not a fan of horror or is unfamiliar with the Predator franchise.  The concept is original for...

Brother and sister no more, now husband and wife! Probably the most problematic line in the entire film, especially since the scene right after that is a long intercourse scene.  Anyway, I had never seen Mary Shelley's Frankenstein  until today and for the most part, it's an entertaining film.  The first half hour is rubbish backstory that establishes the characters in a boring, drawn out way.  If the rumors are to be believed, this is all director/star Kenneth Branagh's doing.  To be fair, most periods pieces set in the 1700's/1800's are boring as hell.  Fight me on this. Aside from the source material, it is very difficult to label this film in the horror genre along with all the other Frankenstein films.  It very much feels like a dramatic film from the 90's with all the music playing over long shots of sunlit landscapes.  Still, it has elements of horror such as two jump scares and deals with the non-living, so it counts.   D...

It's Robot Blood  Like any good horror film from the 80's the image on the poster is nowhere in the actual film.  It's a shame because I would kill to see that movie, haha "kill".  Chopping Mall is the definitive cult film, it's not very good but it is not completely terrible.  It follows the familiar tropes, with the cool guys and the nerds fighting together, the evils of sex which means nudity! Well, boobies.   The intro was reminiscent of Fast Times with people going to and fro inside a mall depicting restaurants and arcades.  Although Dawn of the Dead tackled the "trapped in a mall" theme eight years earlier, this film is not as eloquent and doesn't seem to provide social commentary on the shopping obsessed culture of the time.  Instead, we get a fun, fairly entertaining story about killer sentient robots brought to life a la Frankenstein.  The 30 something looking "teens" get together to try to eliminate three evil r...

The second film in this year's Images of Fright Film Festival was Another Wolfcop .  Seeing Wolfcop in 2016, I was refreshing in the sense that it was an original take on a werewolf movie that was not afraid to be campy at times.  Despite the tagline on the poster above, this sequel was bizarre and disappointing me as a fan.  Spoilers below. It started with an over abundance of sex and fart jokes that really took me out of the movie.  Granted, Wolfcop had sex scenes and boobies but for some reason the director thought it would be hilariouuuuuuuuus to keep coming back to these tired tropes throughout the movie.  A fourth grader would probably find the first couple times funny and then get worn out by the same joke.  Stupid jokes aside, my main issue with this film was it did not respect the intrinsic reality established by the first film. Basically, some rich mogul named Sydney Swallows creates a beer called Chicken Milk that when drank by people, ha...

My Images of Fright Film Festival began today for the ninth straight year.  The firs screening wa sthe gem above and after hearing how much better it was than the classic Lugosi version, I have to agree, kind of.  Truth be told, I have never seen the entire Lugosi version straight through in one sitting.  Dracula has always been my least favorite monster and I have never had much of an interest in him.  The reasoning behind this lies behind the fact that he just looks like an ordinary guy and not a monster.  Personally, I like my monsters to look and act animalistic or dead or something to really stand out from humans.  Additionally, films like Monster Squad and that abomination that Stephen Sommers vomited a couple years back with Hugh Jackman have made Dracula the "main villain" as if he was smarter or better than the other monsters.  I think this is due to stupidity on the studio's part thinking that if moviegoers see a villain that looks like th...