6 Trailers For Labor Day

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let’s celebrate Labor Day with the latest installment of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Exploitation Trailers.

1) Graveyard Shift — This is a Canadian film from 1986. Ever since I first saw it on DVD last year, this has been one of my favorite vampire films. It’s an atmospheric, strangely well-acted film that is just trashy enough to remain interesting.

2) Panorama Blue — I’ve never seen this movie and apparently, it’s a lost film of some sort. The trailer can be found on one of the 42nd Street Forever compilation DVDs. Apparently, this is some sort of pornographic epic. I just enjoy the trailer even though I wouldn’t be caught dead on a roller coaster. (They’re scary!)

3) Zombi 3 — This film is credited to Lucio Fulci but he actually only directed about 60% of it before he was fired and replaced by Bruno Mattei. This trailer deserves some sort of award because it manages to make an amazingly boring film look exciting and almost fun.

4) Rolling Thunder — Another film that I’ve never seen (and another trailer that I first found on a 42nd Street compilation). This is an effectively moody trailer. As a Texan, I also like the fact that Rolling Thunder apparently not only takes place in Texas but was also actually shot there with actual Texans in the cast. And I love the ominous yet casual way that Tommy Lee Jones delivers the “I’ll get my gear,” line.

5) Angel — This is a trailer from the early 80s. This is another one of those trailers that I love because it’s just so shamelessly sordid and trashy.

6) Hitch-Hike — Okay, quick warning — this trailer is explicit. Not as explicit as many grindhouse trailers but it’s still explicit enough that some people might find it objectionable. It’s certainly not safe for work though why are you visiting this site from work anyway?

However, all that taken into account, it’s still a very good trailer for a very good movie, 1977’s Hitch-Hike. Not only is it a nicely cynical little thriller, but it features not only another iconic psycho performance from David Hess but also a brilliant lead performance from Franco Nero. I will also admit right now that if I ever got my hands on a time machine, the first thing I would do would be go back to 1977 and give Franco Nero a hummer. Seriously.

Okay, I’ve said too much. Just watch the trailer and enjoy one of Ennio Morricone’s best scores.

A Quickie with Lisa Marie: The American (Dir. by Anton Corbijn)

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier today, I had the misfortune to sit through the just released movie The American.

The title character, as played by George Clooney (who also produced the film), is an aging assassin. He’s done some bad, bad things and, as a result, he has some bad, bad people after him. So, he hides out in an isolated, Italian village. He makes friends with the local priest, engages in some shady business of some sort with a mysterious woman (Thekla Reuten), and of course falls in love with the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold (Violante Placido). The whole time, the American is aware that his days are numbered and that he can trust no one.

And who really cares?

Director Anton Corbijn appears to be trying to do an homage to the noir-influenced French New Wave of the late 50s and 1960s but he seems to have forgotten that Jean-Luc Godard’s and Francois Truffaut’s films were usually as entertaining as they were intellectually stimulating. (This, of course, is something that Godard forgot as well.) As a result, The American often feels like a parody of an art film. Every scene drips with great importance and all the actors play their roles like they’re in a passion play but, in the end, it’s just a lot of pretension that ultimately adds up to nothing.

As a movie, the American is pretty to look at but I lost interest in it fairly early. Corbijn tries to create an atmosphere of ennui but the end result is simply dull. Clooney attempts to give a restrained performance full of self-loathing and paranoia but he’s miscast in the part. George Clooney the producer doesn’t seems to realize that Clooney’s essential shallowness is the key to his appeal. George Clooney comes across as the perfect one-night stand, the epitome of fun-while-it-lasted but nothing to regret once he’s gone. Whenever Clooney attempts to suggest anything suggesting any greater depth — like in this film — he simply seems lost.

Speaking of lost, so was I as I watched this dull, boring movie. I’m sure some will embrace this film but for me, I’ll pass.

Review: The Walking Dead Volume 4 (by Robert Kirkman)

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Arleigh

[Some Spoilers Within]

I’ve loved and obsessed over Kirkman’s The Walking Dead series and the previous three collected volumes have not disappointed at any level. This fourth volume collects issues 19 through 24 and is appropriately titled The Heart’s Desire. We pick up from the cliffhanger that ended the third volume (Safety Behind Bars) as Dexter gives Rick and his group a choice that bodes nothing but death either way he chooses: stay and be shot or leave and take their chances with the zombies outside the fences.

The book starts things off with a bang as Rick realizes that Dexter’s success in getting guns of his own has let loose a bigger set of problems as zombies from a locked wing of the prison was accidentally let out. What happens next as Rick’s group and Dexter’s group fight to stay alive shows a new side to Rick that surprised me alot. It puts a new wrinkle on Rick’s rule of “you kill, you die” and will have long-reaching ramifications deeper in the story. It is also in this heart-pounding sequence that a new face is added to the mix in the form of a female survivor whose mode of survival, to say the very least, is interesting.

The rest of the book really deals less with the zombies but the emotional consequences of many of the characters’ actions from the very start of the series all the way to point of this volume. I can fully understand the disappoint many fans have with the direction the series took with all the drama and sopa opera kind of twists nd turns of the heart, but I think people fail to realize that Kirkman is writing about the human condition rather than just about zombies. Sure I got abit impatient with all the emotional crisis and the meltdowns by almost everyone involved, but I can also understand why they’ve been acting the way they have. I think if Kirkman had written abit more of zombies and death in this part of the series people wouldn’t be complaining much.

Kirkman himself has already admitted that zombies wasn’t what the story was all about, but just a part of it. With the group in relatively safety within the secured fences of the prison and some sort of artificial normalcy starting to come back to the group he needed a way to continue the conflicts that make for good drama. What else but let the pent-up emotional baggage everyone has been carrying since issue 1 to finally come to boil. Part of me didn’t fully enjoy this new arc in the series, but not enough to be disappointed with the end result. Hell, even with all the drama Kirkman still came up with one of the best fight scenes in the series a la Carpenter’s They Live and South Park’s “Cripple Fight” episode.

The Heart’s Desire was not as great as the previous three collected volumes in the series, but it still told a good story though with a bit more drama than most fans of the book were willing to take. I myself enjoyed the book enough that it wasn’t a waste and I was a bit surprised and shocked at the observation Rick finally made and shared with everyone at the end of the volume. I know that after all the emotional trials and tribulations everyone in the series went through in The Heart’s Desire and how the arc ended there’s nothing left but up for the series.