by ·Comments Off on Junk World (2025, Takahide Hori)

I didn’t need the little robot guy from another movie to get an origin story, but “weirdo pervert stop-motion” is one of my favorite genres, so this was great. Starts with a military unit making their way out of enemy territory, then alternates between rewinding to the same actions from a different character perspective (they took to heart the criticisms that nobody understood what happened in the first movie) and crazily escalating the action/stakes. Kickass protector robot gets injured, rebuilds itself as cuddly robot, time travels to distant past, inspires teddybear-cat creatures to create a complex civilization, then sends daughter of the teddycat leader back to the past to protect the military guys inside a red ducky powersuit.

Ducky streetfighters a Freddy-chested supermutant:

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 33: SHOCKtober Revisits Part 3

Shocker (1989, Wes Craven)

Lawnmower Man-esque story of an electrocuted guy (Mitch “Skinner” Pileggi) who becomes electricity. Our hero (Michael “Tanner” Murphy) jumps inside the television to chase the guy through a montage of TV shows, like a crappy Sherlock Jr. Tanner harnesses the power of the TV Remote Control to gain the upper hand. Someone’s head goes through a TV set (two years after Dream Warriors) while I’m watching this wearing my Videodrome shirt.

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Deadly Friend (1986, Wes Craven)

First I had to rewind far enough to see Momma From The Train’s head get exploded by a basketball, presumably the main thing people remember from this movie. D.F. (OG-Buffy Kristy Swanson) dives out a second-story window to kill Tom (of biker flick Savage Dawn), then she attempts suicide-by-cop, melts into her true robot form and kills Paul (of Little House on the Prairie) offscreen. Murder-bots turning on their owners is a timely topic since I also rewatched M3GAN tonight – after that movie’s expertly uncanny droid, this one’s robot is just a girl wearing too much eyeshadow. It’s always remarkable how bad the ADR was in 1980s movies, like nobody knew what “sounding natural” felt like, or could replicate it using any existing recording equipment.

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976-Evil (1988, Robert Englund)

No recollection what this is about, maybe a blend between Pillow Talk and Unfriended? Mrs. Wilmouth is being devoured by her cats, then Big Hair Angela is molested by Mrs. W’s goblin child. The goblin is called Hoax – his cousin Spike (the only actor who’d return in the sequel) distracts the kid then tosses him into hell, which is in the backyard. I kinda like that every single line reading is awkward, makes the movie less generically bad and more specifically bad.

devil in a sweatervest:

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Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland)

Piecing together what’s happening based on having watched the remake five years back… the vamp Chris “Jack” Skellington is too dentally distorted to recognize, old Roddy McDowall is fighting him back but the nerdy boy Herman’s Head Charlie gets bitten after a really nice bat transformation, while in the basement his girl Amy has already turned vampish. Smashing the windows to let the sunlight in is also how they won in From Dusk Till Dawn, the green-burning vampire skeleton pretty sweet. Coda: everything’s back to normal, Roddy on TV, the kid making out with his girl, and vamps living next door awaiting the sequel. Hoax from 976-EVIL is in this, but either he’s dead by now or I can’t recognize him without the demon makeup. Holland is best known as codirector of The Timekeepers of Eternity.

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Prom Night (1980, Paul Lynch)

There are a lotta kids at this prom and I don’t care to figure out who they all are. Thugs beat up the prom king and steal his crown, then the movie gets its Carrie blood-bucket moment when the masked killer rolls the false king’s severed head out on stage. Hero vs. Villain fight ensues, awkward choreography but a nice disco song. The queen was Jamie Lee Curtis??

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The Kindred (1987, Obrow & Carpenter)

Hat Guy has arrived to collect his killer mutant baby or whatever, says the mutant beastie is John’s brother, but there’s no convincing John, who electrocutes the thing until it explodes and takes Hat Guy with it. Rubber baby beasties attack until Brad (The Hills Have Eyes 2) blows up the whole damn house. Fortunately his dead girlfriend Sharon (of Crawlspace) is somehow alive in the crawlspace. Very gloopy gloppy movie. Nobody seems to like it, but I remember it being good, oh yeah, I was eleven. The directors had made two others together, and separately Obrow did a Dean Koontz adaptation with multiple Twin Peaks actors and Carpenter did a Luke Wilson/Ken Marino ghost movie.

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Fiend Without a Face (1958, Arthur Crabtree)

“They’re becoming visible!” Stop-motion spine/brain creatures climbing trees, cool, apparently caused by “the atomic plant,” so Jeff is going to go blow it up. “Perhaps I can control them” says the professor moments before he’s killed by brains, which make funny sputtering ketchup bottle sfx when they’re shot. Post-explosion, the brains immediately melt – this is one of the goopiest 1950s movies, the Kindred of its time.

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Alucarda (1977, Juan López Moctezuma)

Bloody naked Justine savagely claws at a religious lady – they’ve come to a truce when the lady’s idiot doctor friend comes in splashing around beakers of holy water, J gets skeletonized and the lady bitten. As a result(?), young supervampire Alucarda speaks the magic words that cause all nuns to burst into flame. There is a lot of screaming! Al has a holy water protection field, and these bozos only had one idea, but fortunately Al is a girl, and these last two movies have demonstrated that girls’ reaction to horror is to scream and be useless to stop it, so Al goes mad from her own fiery destructive wrath and vanishes. Director made the also not-great Mansion of Madness, Al was recently in a netflix movie called Grumpy Christmas.

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Phenomena (1985, Dario Argento)

Uh oh, Jennifer Connelly is stuck in a maggoty flooded dead body dumpster, someone has been watching Poltergeist. The man chained up nearby breaks his own thumb to escape the cuffs (a common tactic lately) and attack Jen’s cackling tormentor, but Jen escapes on her own. It’s not an Italian movie until we encounter a horribly dubbed child, and this one’s got a scary face and a halberd. Jen’s terrified screams summon a swarm of flies that eat the kid’s mutant face off. She tries to escape by boat but is so technically unhandy, the boat explodes leaving her trapped in a ring of fire, then she’s saved by a razor-wielding monkey. Every line and edit and action seems a little odd – I think this is what makes Argento’s movies stand out, and I didn’t understand his vibe when I first watched this on VHS.

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Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson)

I remember this and The Machinist being a big deal, a hot new Anderson on the scene, but haven’t thought about either one in a long while and never watched his follow-ups. Gordon is lobotomizing guys through their eye sockets while dreaming that an imaginary labcoat guy is responsible. We’re doing the post-Fight Club pre-Shudder Island thing of revisiting all the past kills with the knowledge that our delusional protag was the killer all along. Seems like a just-alright indie movie in retrospect.

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Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988, David DeCoteau)

Think this was more USA Up All Night than Channel 11 Shocktober. Our intrepid heroes (a hotgirl and nerdy Calvin) are searching a foggy warehouse for she-demons, manage to clumsily set Evil Babs With Unidentified Accent on fire after she kills Nude Victim Lisa offscreen. Some more stuff happens, it’s not worth recounting. The lighting and acting are very bad – there’s boobs, but USA wouldn’t have shown them, so why did anyone watch this? We get a demon puppet, at least. Nude Victim was later in Puppet Master 3, Babs is from Slumber Party Massacre, and our heroes were both in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 the same year.

by ·Comments Off on Hardware (1990, Richard Stanley)

This is clever in its visual transitions and I like the early bits of the soundtrack composed of chill slide guitar (and Iggy Pop as a wacky DJ), but ultimately feels like a cool robot design with a movie loosely hung around it.

Dylan McDermott (also of future-robot movie Automata) and his sidekick Shades (of Jarman’s Edward II) bring the scavenged head of a self-healing military attack robot to Dylan’s off-again girlfriend Jill (Phantasm II). She puts on some Ministry before integrating the head into one of her artworks (Spielberg would use the same band to convey dystopian junkyard aesthetics a decade later).

Three guesses which one is Shades:

Unfortunately the robot was built as part of a government program to kill all the humans, and it reactivates to complete its mission. First it lets the girl’s creeper neighbor (Wm Hootkins of Death Machine) make a slow fool of himself before it megakills him. Jill lowers her body heat to undetectable levels by jumping into an open-door fridge for five seconds, then they throw the robot in the shower and it does the whole “I’m melting” bit.

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)

Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different levels of reality, like a boring eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)

Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking paint) busts the doll, and the inventor’s daughter covers by pretending to be the heir’s sex robot until they can repair it. Everything is gleefully artificial – the costumes and sets and acting all preposterous. I didn’t jibe with the organ soundtrack on the blu-ray, so – per the director’s original intent – I put on Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks as the soundtrack. I find myself playing Hesitation Marks all the time lately, Lubitsch knows why.

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched Sept 2024

Revenger (1958, Dusan Vukotic)

Scarf Guy catches his wife cheating, goes to the gun store and imagines every possible scenario, none of them especially good, so he buys a butterfly net. That part must’ve made more sense in the original Chekhov story. Getting around to watching more by Vukotic after enjoying Cow on the Moon and Cowboy Jimmy.

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The Playful Robot (1956, Dusan Vukotic)

A nutty one with excellent music. Scientist in a sort of Wallace-automated Jetsons laboratory creates a sentient humanoid robot then tells it to clean the lab while he naps. Instead it creates two smaller child robots so it can also nap, but they focus more on messing with each other. Not sure why a flying saucer bird hatches from an egg at the end, but the scientist wakes up and isn’t at all displeased by this messy racket.

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The Struggle (1977, Marcell Jankovics)

Very good and short, feels like Bill Plympton turned classical. A muscley sculptor chisels away at a block while it chisels away at him, until the block has become a muscley human figure and the sculptor is old and busted. I still remember Marcell’s Sisyphus animation 15 years later. Won the (short) palme d’or.

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Eyetoon (1968, Jerry Abrams)

Blobby abstract art flickers, fast-motion driving demo, geometric and psychedelic patterns, sex drugs and rock & roll – for the first half it can’t decide what it wants to be, then it settles on being an avant-porno for the second half.

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Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934, Fred Waller)

Cab, even more of a goofball than expected and making the most of his floppy hair, rehearses with his pajama-wearing band in the sleeper car of a train, then they perform at the Cotton Club. Train Porter Sam buys a radio to keep his Chicago hotwife entertained while he’s away, Cab finds out the hotwife is alone and entertains her in person. Corny and hardly technically perfect, but there aren’t a lotta opportunities to see Cab dancing to his own songs.

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Senor Droopy (1949, Tex Avery)

Wolf the star bullfighter is trouncing the bull, who then turns the tables. Nobody takes Droopy seriously, then the bull disrespects his dream girl and he gets mad. It’s Tex Avery, it’s Droopy, it’s good.

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Chumlum (1964, Ron Rice)

A parade of double-and-more-exposures. Ron got Jack Smith and the Warholites to dress up and act freaky with percussive music by an ex-Velvet. It’s only 20 minutes and at least five of that is a girl swinging in a hammock chair. I’m sure it’s very transgressive but nobody appears to be having much fun except maybe Ron in the editing room.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in production of Smith’s Normal Love … a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze … a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye … it was only in the crazy crucible of Chumlum that Smith’s frittering, flailing “play” out in front of the camera seemed to find a mostly-in-focus chemical twin behind the lens.

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Los Angeles Plays New York (2016, John Wilson)

John Wilson shot and edited a piece for a fashion guy who refuses to pay, so… he sues his friend Clark, standing in for the MIA fashion guy, after filming a fake fashion short with Clark as the supposed client, and they get booked on a boring new Judge Judy-affiliated court show and bring in a hidden camera. John then worries whether this short film violates his agreement with the TV studio and they’ll sue him over it, so he claims it can’t be released… then how am I watching it?

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Mr. Hayashi (1961, Bruce Baillie)

A great idea to make three-minute sun-bathed interview/portraits, there should be a thousand more of these. This one’s with Mr. Hayashi, part-time gardener – that’s about all we learn about him.

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To Parsifal (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Bruce’s Leviathan – he rides a fishing boat and watches water and birds. After the halfway point he moves to land, exploring the railroad and its surrounding vegetation and insect life, all while listening to Wagner.

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Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Death/applause intro, then a hazy drift of city superimpositions. Long take tailing a motorcycle in San Francisco (not a known habitat of the Dakota Sioux) over the titles with church music. He does play with focus in a purposeful way (the ol’ rack from a distant American flag to nearby barbed wire) but sometimes the picture is so soft and blurry that you wonder if he remembered to focus at all. Parades, war, advertisements filmed off a TV with shaky reception. Repeated applause, motor vehicles, and bananas. Shots from X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes! The city pays little mind as a dead man is removed from the sidewalk to an ambulance, and the sea and the motorcycle roll on.

Horizon at the bottom of frame? That’s interesting:

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

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Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.