Tag Archives: Post-Apocalyptica

March 9, 2012 · 9:46 pm

The Hunger Games

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0545425115&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
I can see why this is so popular, and I enjoyed it very much. Excellent protagonist who is very sure of herself in some ways and not in others; Katniss Everdeen makes for good company, and I’ve always been a fan of YA dystopias (back in my day, the Tripods books by John Christopher were awesome).
It’s a thriller through and through, and once the games begin it ramps up again and again. Collins learned from Spillane to sell the next book with the last page. I’m very eager to read book two, but I have many more in my TBR pile and I’ll wait for the next movie’s release before I spend an afternoon reading it.

Collins paints characters well, though don’t expect more than archetype for those on the sidelines. This lives up to the hype and I look forward to seeing the post-apocalyptic world fleshed out in the rest of the trilogy. I enjoyed this more than many recent thrillers written for adults, and while some are iffy on questioning government authority when they agree with who is in power, it is always a good subject for readers of any age.

Highly recommended.

© 2012 Thomas Pluck
I post on Twitter as TommySalami ~ My Facebook Page

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December 5, 2011 · 1:52 pm

Fartpocalypse

If you need a dose of immature potty humor and ’80s metal nostalgia, or if you don’t, check out my story “Not With a Bang, But a Squeaker,” finally published in fully unexpurgated form at the beautifully designed Schlock Magazine‘s Apocalypse issue.

They got Marco Attard to draw a stunning tableaux of our four heroes and their dark lord before they embark on the metalest armageddon ever. Meet Carl, Arf, Eddie and The Incredible Hersch as they bargain with the devil himself to become The Four Horsemen, which they only know about from the song on Metallica’s first album.

And check out the whole issue, they did a great job…

© 2011 Thomas Pluck

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March 2, 2010 · 11:24 am

movie compactor

To conserve paper, I have reviewed 5 recent movies in one post. With one week to the Oscars I still haven’t seen a few. I’m hoping to see The White Ribbon this weekend. Gonna skip Crazy Heart, as much as I like Jeff Bridges, because I saw Tender Mercies. But these are worth seeing:

Big Fan
Patton Oswalt as “that guy,” the face-painting home team obsessed freako who lives in mom’s basement and stays up late to rant on the local AM sports talk radio show. Oswalt once again shows his enormous range (you thought I was gonna say ass, didn’t you?) by totally becoming this role. Written and directed by the screenwriter of The Wrestler, we know to expect him to be a busted up shell of a man filling a hole in himself with his fanaticism. He sees his team’s quarterback one night and he and his buddy follow him to a strip club, and work up the guts to approach him. Things happen and he gets assaulted, and must decide just how much he’ll suffer for his home team. It’s a bit weak in the third act and ending, but as a character study it’s pretty gripping. This is one of the better films of last year that was sadly overlooked, and a fine first directorial effort for Onion alumnus Robert D. Siegel.

4 face-painters out of 5

Big Fan on Netflix

The Blind Side
This movie’s getting a lot of hate. Straight up: I enjoyed it. I think we’ve become accustomed to discounting uplifting fare as inherently shallow, and while it may be a stretch to nominate this for Best Picture, if Avatar is up there this has every right to be. The Hollywood take on Michael Oher’s rise to football stardom, this is a sports story with a deeply human element that is unafraid to tell us what we’re supposed to mean when we say “Christian charity.” The Tuohy family is rich; Mr. Tuohy is a former basketball superstar who now runs a gaggle of fast food franchises. The film obliquely points the finger at our millionaire sports heroes to perhaps give a little back, as Mrs. Tuohy- played with organic brilliance by Sandra Bullock, in what will hopefully be a controversial Oscar-winning performance that will bump Marisa Tomei’s win for My Cousin Vinny as the film snobs’ “least deserved award” category- decides to do the right thing and bring the practically-orphaned “Big Mike” Oher under her wing. This is old-school Hollywood storymaking, not unlike Slumdog Millionaire without Danny Boyle’s directorial strength. John Lee Hancock does a workmanlike job. He also wrote the screenplay, which to the real Michael Oher’s chagrin, makes him a sort of football oaf to begin with, when he was rather skilled by the time the Tuohys helped him. The real story is how they overcome their fear and saw Michael as a person, and shared their abundance of both the material and the emotional to make him part of their family. So what if it’s couched in a tale written for the demographic where both sexes love football from birth? It’s uplifting without being smarmy, and isn’t as simple as its critics claim it to be.

4 out of 5 ladies who lunch but also give back to their community

The Blind Side on Netflix

The Road
Adapting Cormac McCarthy is difficult but obviously possible; No Country for Old Men, anyone? This one’s not so easy, as much of the story is internalized. The screenplay veers from the source at times, to give us a female character to please the bean counters; I felt this was a distracting mistake. The story is simple- an unknown disaster has cut the shackles of civilization and returned man to his more bestial state, and a father resolves to protect his son from the ravages of cannibals and nature, so he may “carry the fire” of humanity, and bring hope to the bleak future. How does the world end? In this version we know it’s a bang, when it was left ambiguous before. Does it matter if it’s a whimper, or fire or ice? Not really, in the grand scheme of things. Humanity is consuming itself, literally. What the movie gets right is showing how the father- Viggo Mortensen- loses hope. How can he carry the fire when it has gone out inside him? Like Frank Darabont’s similar take with The Mist, the father’s protective drive has corrupted him. I found this a little too spoonfed, and I didn’t care for the flashbacks to the mother, though I see the parallels and contrasts director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) was making. My suggestion: see this first if you haven’t read the book yet, and let the book expand on it.

4 out of 5 long pig banquets

The Road on Netflix

Everybody’s Fine
Robert DeNiro plays a retired widower, who Harry Chapin was singing about in “The Cat’s in the Cradle.” He drove his children to be ambitious and worked hard while his wife handled family matters, and now that she’s gone, no one has time to visit. It surprised me by shifting alliances, showing the old man’s own flaws and how past wounds run deep. This one rises above the standard tearjerker, but never goes much further. Bobby is always endearing and is perhaps the perfect image of that sort of hard working family man who was always too tired to really give to his family, but I never really felt his sadness, like Jack Nicholson managed in the similar film About Schmidt. This was based on an Italian classic from the 90′s entitled Stanno tutti bene, starring the unequaled Marcello Mastroianni, and the new script has some nice touches. Bobby made PVC casing for telephone wires, and only talks on land lines (rather like Paulie from Goodfellas); his children are well played by Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. At first they seem like the usual busy, ungrateful kids but bloom into real people. It’ll do well on cable.

3.5 out of 5 million miles of wire

Everybody’s Fine on Netflix

Food, Inc.
Are you eating? Might want to read this later. This should be for the modern food industry what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was for turn of the century sausage factories, but I doubt many people saw it. Like the lackluster dramatization Fast Food Nation, this documentary exposes the industrialized network of factory farms and how it accepts disease and death among us, its customers, to serve its bottom line. I bet you expect the FDA to protect you from this, but the fact is they were created to promote and protect “farmers” and “cattlemen,” who are now mostly large corporate conglomerates benefiting from government-sponsored local monopolies. We see the victims of E. coli poisoning from “undercooked” beef- which would be perfectly safe if it wasn’t contaminated with, you know, shit- and E. coli tainted vegetables infected from manure runoff, since these county-sized slaughterhouse operations can’t dispose of the cow shit, which could probably fill one of the Great Lakes. Don’t criticize them too loudly, for they are protected by Federal Law (just ask Oprah, who was prosecuted for saying she wouldn’t eat beef until we tested all our cattle for Mad Cow disease, which we still don’t).

Genetically Modified foods are explored as well; they concentrate on Monsanto, not for abstract fear of “frankenfood” as some call it, but for how they have patented life, cornered the market on soybeans, and made it illegal for farmers who purchase their seed to … plant the seeds that were naturally produced. Plants produce seeds; but you can only plant the ones you buy from Monsanto. Your food now comes with a service agreement. It’s an eye-opening documentary, and while I found The Cove important, this is more so. If you wonder why a McMuffin costs less than a head of broccoli, rent this and find out. And wash and cook your food thoroughly. To quote Fast Food Nation, “everybody has to eat a little shit sometime.” Dig in.

5 out of 5 grass-fed free range organic strip steaks, hold the E. coli

Food, Inc. on Netflix

© 2010 Thomas Pluck.

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August 11, 2009 · 8:57 am

The Mad Max-a-Thon!

Movie Nights With Milky

Last week Milky and I decided to watch all three of the Mad Max movies. Some of the best of the post-apocalyptic genre, the movies that catapulted Mel Gibson to stardom, and some of the best car chases ever. However, it was a bittersweet moment. As a child of the ’80s, Milky was too young to watch the first two, and grew up on Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. He recalled it fondly, reciting Max’s line of “I’m the one who keeps Mr. Dead in his pocketses!” You could watch his heart break as his nostalgic memories crumbled. Unfortunately, they follow the Star Wars Trilogy formula of: First movie is fun, Second movie is brutally awesome, and Third movie is a cash-in to attract kiddie audiences.
Mad Max exploded out of Australia in 1979- a bastard son of the biker exploitation flick, violent cop thriller, depictions of society’s breakdown straight from the ’70s zeitgeist. It recalls such classics as A Boy and His Dog, which the creators cite as an influence, Electra Glide in Blue, the motorcycle cop character drama, Westerns and revenge films. It was shot on a budget so low that they kept repainting the same police cars- the Ford Falcon XB sedans, the “last of the V8 interceptors”- and only Mel Gibson, then unknown, actually got to wear a real leather jacket. The smaller cop parts got vinyl. The plot is simple- Max Rockatansky is the cool as Steve McQueen member of the Motor Police, as society breaks down and the roads become more and more dangerous, with roaming biker gangs and maniacs joy riding. After he takes out a psycho called the Night Rider, his friend Toecutter, leader of an outlaw biker gang, vows revenge on the police.
Toecutter and his fearful flunky Johnny the Boy trap Goose in his flipped truck and burn him alive, which sends Max over the edge. The cops have to play by the rules, and the bikers don’t. Rather than go psycho and become “one of them,” Max takes his wife and infant son on a road trip vacation, but Toecutter and company stalk them and take their revenge. Now Max has nothing to lose, and takes his V8 interceptor, a sawed off shotgun, and his wits to finish off the gang. The crashes are particularly realistic and brutal, owing to the remote stretches of Australian highway and some excellent or very lucky stunt work. We see cop cars explode through mobile homes, vans twisted like tin foil, bikers explode like meatballs against tractor trailer grilles. The infamous ending, where Max handcuffs Johnny’s ankle to a burning wreck and throws him a hacksaw, making him choose whether to cut steel or flesh before the gas tank explodes, is one of the most brutal and memorable avengings ever filmed.
Today, the low budget of the film is quite evident in some of the make-up effects, the sound quality, and how some scenes are edited, but it still holds up very well. First time actors abound, but they are among classically trained fellows. It takes time to introduce us to the character of Max Rockatansky, as if the film makers knew he’d be coming back. Sure, some of his cop pals like Fifi- a big bald guy who wears a silk scarf- evoke some chuckles, and the lawyers who get Johnny Boy off are hilarious stereotypes, but as a whole this remains one of the best revenge pictures of the 70′s. So much that it would be released in the states with an American overdub to save us from Aussie slang and accents! I urge you to watch the original, it’s available on the Special Edition DVD.

Goodbye, Johnny the Boy!

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was inevitable after the success of the first film, and unlike most sequels, it is superior in every way. It’s a marvel of concise film making, depending on a short introduction with narration to recall Max’s tragedy in the first movie, and the complete breakdown of society that transpired shortly afterward. It’s intentionally vague: “two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.” It never mentions nuclear Armageddon, and I prefer to think that oil dried up and society devoured itself. We meet Max again on the road in his Interceptor, modified with huge gas tanks, booby traps, roll cage and supercharger; he’s got a Blue Heeler along side him. A Man and His Dog. With marauders in pursuit of his sweet ride and its tank of precious juice…
The bikers have gone full tribal, guns and ammo are scarce, so they wield bludgeons and crossbows. Reduce, re-use, recycle. A mohawked maniac named Wez gets shot in the arm by friendly fire, due to Max’s superior driving skills, and a silent feud begins between the two. They will meet again. The mood and theme of the story are told perfectly in this opening scene as Max faces off the wounded biker, antsy as he watches a bad guy’s car spilling fuel on the roadway. He’ll risk his life to sop up a few more ounces of the gas. For anyone who remembers the lines around the block at gas stations during the oil embargo, it hits home.

Coolest dog ever!

Max is as cool as they come, eking out a lone survival with his dog at his side. He barely speaks a word for the first half hour of the film. He comes upon a gyrocopter in the desert, with a poisonous snake guarding its fuel, but he’s fast enough to grab it before it strikes. Borrowing heavily from The Man With No Name of the Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone films- he’ll actually be called this in the next sequel- Max is a little more human and vulnerable. It’s one of Gibson’s best roles, because he lacks that cocksure star power that sinks most action stars. I could recount every scene of the movie, because it’s that good, and so many are memorable. But if you haven’t seen this, it holds up incredibly well. Max takes the gyro captain prisoner, and they see the bikers Max fought earlier, surrounding a walled encampment around an oil refinery. They can’t escape, and the bikers can’t get the gas. Enter Max, who found a tractor trailer, that could haul their tanker of gas to freedom…
The leader of the bikers, The Humungous, is as iconic as they come. A masked, musclebound freak who looks like Jason Voorhees crossed with Arnold Schwarzenegger, his growled, Germanic taunts make him instantly fearsome. His men strap the wounded enemy to their vehicles as human shields. Inside the compound, the last vestiges of humanity are led by Papagallo (big chicken?) with flamethrowers, bow wielding warrior women, and feral children with razor-bladed boomerangs. Max is in between, mistaken for a marauder at first. He works a bargain- he’ll get the truck, for as much gas as he can carry. They want him to join them, but he refuses. Just the deal.

In post-apocalyptic films, children should not speak, but be spoken to

The set pieces with the tanker truck are still some of the best car chases on film. First, Max has to get the bobtail into the compound, and he plows through the biker camp like a juggernaut. Director George Miller- who’d oddly enough move on to 3D features like Happy Feet- inserts quick comic shots, like a tent being pulled away to reveal a naked couple, to keep the mood from becoming as brutal as the first film. He manages just the right balance. I told Milky that the Feral Kid isn’t annoying like Short Round because he can’t speak, and I hold fast to that statement. There’s a camp sense- one of the baddies drives a pink Chevy Bel-Air and has a pink beard- but it never gets smarmy or silly, as in the final chapter.
Once Max returns the truck he leaves alone, and loses everything once again- only the Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence, the Mouth of Sauron among many other roles) manages to save him. So he decides to join up and help them escape, driving the tanker. Why? Because it’s suicidal; Max doesn’t want to be human again, even if he’ll never sink to the lows of the Humongous and his ilk. But a last mad dash through a swarm of psychos appeals to him. And the final chase remains a thrilling, insane update to Buster Keaton’s locomotive stunt film The General and has yet to be topped. It may also have been inspired by Race with the Devil, where cultists chase Warren Oates and Peter Fonda in an RV, and countless Westerns where Indians chase stagecoaches.
The stunts were incredibly dangerous, and the infamous ass over teakettle biker flipping through the air was an actual accident that broke the stunt man’s leg. The driver of the tanker was told to not eat for 12 hours prior to the crash stunt, in case he had to be rushed to surgery. Some of the footage is sped up a bit, but most of the road chase is at good speed, and the tanker demolishes many, many vehicles. What’s surprising of Mad Max 2 is that no one is safe; nowadays you know the paralyzed mechanic, and the hot chick are going to survive. Nuh-uh! They die horribly this time. And our hero is gets a very cynical trick pulled on him. It makes for a very memorable ending, and a “second entry” that stands on its own.

The Tanker Chase

The third time around they had a huge American-style budget and unfortunately, for the clumsily named Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, they tried to broaden the appeal by making it PG-13 and included a killer retard, a funny midget, a Lord of the Flies in the Outback, and Tina Turner as Auntie Entity, a name which makes no sense. The Humongous was obvious; he was … humongous! Toecutter, well I guess if you cross him, your toes would be cut. But Auntie Entity… say it three times fast, and if you’re a 12 year old boy you’ll be … tittering. Heh.
This one is half a reboot, because while Max is older with straggly gray hair, and a herd of camels are towing his truck, guns are more plentiful, radiation is mentioned, and when the Gyro Captain shows up, they don’t recognize each other! Oh, it’s infuriating. But the movie isn’t awful and does have its charms, especially if you fast forward from when Max is sent to the Gulag to the chase at the end. That leaves out the whole second act, the Lord of the Flies homage, which is utterly contrary to the mood of the series. The Airplane Kids are the Ewoks of the Mad Max world, and it’s a shame only one of them dies. It really would have been better if they all died in an explosion that sent Max into a murderous rage, but what can you do. It was 1985.

No, Pinkbeard doesn’t return for Thunderdome, sadly.

The Gyro Captain (cough, I mean “Jedediah the pilot”) steals Max’s caravan, so he tracks them to Bartertown- an aptly named place where people go to trade. Also, for the first time, Max encounters people without Australian accents. Must’ve been tourists before civilization collapsed, I guess. Max barters his skills as a killer, showing off his stuff by blasting the headdress off a knife-swinging tough with his sawed-off. Very Indiana Jones. The fat merchant who decides who can enter, The Collector, sees promise in Max for a sinister plan, and introduces him to the supposed leader of Bartertown: Auntie Entity. Played by Tina Turner in a chain mail dress, she’s actually believable and quite good. She shows Max why they need him by taunting the leader of the city’s underworld, Master Blaster, into putting the town’s pig-shit fueled power supply on Embargo, and her lip quivers with the sting of acknowledgement that she is beholden to the little man’s power. And she’ll kill to be free of his fetters.
To avoid strife, she wants a stranger to do it- so Max is recruited to pick a fight with the hulking two-headed behemoth, a helmeted giant with a midget on his back barking orders. Master is played by little person Angelo Rositto, who’d been in Tod Browning’s Freaks and the ’70s midget crime caper Little Cigars. Unfortunately, he speaks in broken English, spouting things like “him brain broken! my vehicle. You… pedestrian!!” This makes him a bit too twee for a guy who orders his giant to strangle people, and fight in the Thunderdome with chainsaws. But nevermind. Max wants his car back, and Master Blaster has it, so he picks a fight, and all disputes are settled in the Thunderdome. You know the story. Two men enter. One man leaves.
Max fights, and learns Master Blaster’s secret- that the murderous giant is well, a giant killer retard. The score by Maurice Jarre swells with pathos as we look at his face, to make us forget that just moments ago, he stabbed someone with a spear and was trying to cut Max in half with a chainsaw! It does this twice, and it’s really sickening. Thankfully, Auntie’s men can’t hear the soundtrack, and shoot him with crossbows, put Master in tiny chains, and subject Max to the Wheel of Fortune. Break a deal, face the wheel. The possible outcomes on the Wheel are: – Death – Hard Labour – Acquittal – Gulag – Aunty’s Choice – Spin Again – Forfeit Goods – Underworld – Amputation – Life Imprisonment. I was hoping for “Lose a Turn” but no such luck. Max gets… Gulag.
Gulag is especially ignominous, because not only to they tie you to a donkey and shove you off into the desert, put they also put a humiliating Mardi Gras head on you. This way, if anyone sees you, they’ll be too busy laughing to rescue you. And it almost works. But as Max’s donkey dies of dehydration and is swallowed by quicksand, he is found by a wandering nomad. A child, who drags him back to her oasis. She thinks he is Captain Walker, the airplane pilot who abandoned them years ago. She and her Lord of the Flies tribe of cutesy-talking kids want him to take them to Tomorrowmorrow land, the place they’ll finded after the pockyclipse. Yes, they really talk like this. Between them and Master Blaster, there’s way too much baby talk in this movie for it to be a Mad Max story.

If only dingoes had eaten them all as babies!

And this sequence drags on forever, as Max refuses to lead them, and they go off on their own, and he has to save them, and then they’re so close to Bartertown that they just up and decide to free Master. To be generous I’ll say Max wants to steal Master away to destroy the town’s power supply and stick it to Auntie for crossing him, and this leads to what should be the best car chase of the series, but it’s just a rehash of Road Warrior on train tracks. Not horrible, but we’ve seen it before. And guess who shows up at the end? Bruce Spence as Jedediah, who captains a little cropduster instead of a gyro these days. And he has a son like Feral Kid, except he talks. He lives conveniently at the end of the line, so they can escape on his plane. I could have forgiven this vegemite ex machina if Max and Jed recognized each other. He could have just said “You again!” but no, another opportunity lost.
Now, I’ve complained a lot but it’s not that bad, despite being overlong and toned down. The Bartertown sequence is quite memorable and has become part of popular culture, at least on the nerd quadrants of the internet. It’s not quite an offensive end to the trilogy, but like Jedi, seems crafted to appeal to kids. Vernon Wells, so memorable as Wez the mohawked marauder, was busy playing Bennett in Commando and the evil biker in Weird Science and did not return. I wonder if they asked. Other than Max, he’s the most iconic star of the series. The success of this movie sent director George Miller on to make The Witches of Eastwick and Happy Feet. He now wants to make a 3-D animated Mad Max movie called Fury Road without Mel Gibson, which makes me dubious. I liked the penguin movie, but Mad Max doesn’t need the Beowulf treatment. What made these movies so visceral was that the stunts were real; just because the director lives in an animated world doesn’t mean the story has to follow. I hope he changes his mind, and at least gives Mel a cameo. Maybe he can rave about the J-e-w-s stealing all the oil or something.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00005R2IS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrhttp://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000NA1WGS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Yeah of course there’s boobies after the cut, from The Road Warrior.


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August 2, 2009 · 7:52 am

World War Z

Personally I think zombies are a little played out. Romero had a good little run up until ’85. The remake of Dawn of the Dead, and the subsequent “fast” zombie movies like 28 Days Later… and [Rec] (full review) were good; I enjoyed the recent, tongue in cheek Nazi zombie flick Dead Snow (full review) as well. Shaun of the Dead and Fido made us laugh at them. But I think the last zombie movie for a good long while should be the adaptation of Max Brooks’ excellent novel World War Z.
Taking inspiration from Studs Terkel, the master of American oral history, the novel is written as the personal, unedited memoir of a U.N. historian tasked with writing the facts known of the zombie epidemic that nearly wiped out humanity. It’s strikingly effective, and while Brooks- son of comedy master Mel, and author of the previous cult hit The Zombie Survival Guide- isn’t quite as developed a writer as he may one day be, he manages to craft a gripping narrative by knowing what to include and what to leave as mystery. Some of his characters are a little cliché, but he hits the mark more often than not, and the ones that work really sink their infected unliving teeth into you.

He models the epidemic- the true roots of which are never fully explained- on the influenza virus, which slaughtered millions in the previous century. The tendrils of globalism that link every nation, legitimate and illicit, work against us. And he models the reaction of various nations somewhat on the “War on Terror,” fought in the background by our militaries to keep us free to shop, bereft of any sacrifice. And as the title promises, all hell breaks loose. Brooks is quite imaginative and comes up with many unique and clever scenarios that a living dead menace can provide. Zombies on ships, tossed overboard, walk ashore months later. And continue to long after the war is “over.”
Because really, are zombies scary? Lumbering, stupid, slow. You watch a mediocre zombie flick and wonder how anyone is dumb enough to get killed. Well, Brooks makes you scared. The infamous Battle of Yonkers, where conventional warfare faces an onslaught of millions of New York “infected” is brilliant in crafting a real sense of terror about the creatures. Because “smart bombs” aren’t smart enough to hit ‘em in the brain. As in Dead Snow, what happens when they freeze in winter? Each spring spawns new terror for the survivors.

Brooks did a lot of research into everything from weapons, epidemics, geopolitics, and war plans before writing the novel. Having read Terkel’s excellent history of World War 2, The Good War, I could see it was a major influence. He talks to different sides and his characters have different viewpoints. Sometimes he wears his heart on his sleeve a bit, but he manages to create a believable apocalyptic future. If you’ve read so much as a Crichton thriller, this is for you. Don’t dismiss it as “science fiction,” or “horror,” or whatever genre pigeonhole you like. It’s a damn good novel, and hopefully it will be a damn good movie. But honestly, unless it’s as gritty as Children of Men I’d rather it remain a book only. Mr. Romero, we thank you for bringing zombies into popular culture in 1968; but your last few films tell me that you’d best serve as a consultant, or even just a dedication in the credits. This is not your zombie movie.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0307346617&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrhttp://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=plyoto-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1400049628&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

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July 1, 2009 · 1:12 am

Carriers may actually get released

My cousin Lou’s latest movie in post hell is Carriers, with Piper Perabo. A horror movie directed by the Pastor brothers, the title tells it all- after an apocalyptic virus pandemic, a group of friends find out why they ain’t dead yet: they’re carriers! It’s been held up for four years, and looks like it may be going straight to DVD. I’ll see it of course, it’s too bad it didn’t make it to theaters. If stuff like The Haunting in Connecticut (full review of that turd) can get its weekend in the sun of naive teenager money, a post-apocalyptic horror flick sure should.

Bloody Disgusting has some more news. I miss the days of tasteless filmmaking when this would’ve been released during the height of the swine flu panic. I found out about it over at Tractor Facts where they were goofing on the poster, which looks like some sort of zombie softporn:

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September 11, 2008 · 1:18 pm

80s Trash of the Week: Yor, the Hunter from the Future

I’m the hunter of the future? No, Yor are! Thinking back on the 80s, it amazed me that I saw a commercial for this movie on television back then. Then again, I also saw an ad for The Evil Dead, which was sort of cool. With direct to DVD, those days are gone. At first glance it looks like yet another caveman movie about a guy named Yor, with a stone axe and a fur loincloth– but this time the producer had a bunch of Star Wars ripoff costumes left over from another project, so he became a Hunter from the FUTURE.


Reb Brown plays Yor. Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans will remember him from Space Mutiny, a delightfully horrible space opera with lasers, screaming, and a frightening lack of railings. Before he went on to such great things, Reb began humbly here as Yor, and previously in another lost ’80s turd called The Sword and the Sorcerer, also known as “that movie with the three-bladed sword that shoots blades at the bad dudes.” Reb began his career in the snake horror flick Ssssss! and peaked as Captain America in the TV movies in the ’70s. As Yor, he looks like a surfer dude who washed up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and we meet him as he gingerly traipses down the mountainside. For a moment I thought he was one of the gay cavemen from Ringo Starr’s Caveman.

Yor just totally saved your asses, dude!


Nearby, an old man named Pag and a hot brunette in a fur bikini called Kala are hunting dinosaur babies, and run into their prey’s angry momma. Luckily for them, Yor the fiercely blond warrior just happens to be tiptoeing through the pterodactyls in the area, and beats the beast to a bloody pulp with his stone axe. He immediately begins drinking the blood of the fallen creature, to gain its strength, and he is good enough to share. Like Ralph Wiggum, Kala explains that its blood tastes like burning. They ask Yor where he hales from, and all he can say is “um, up that mountain?” For he knows not from whence he came.

We raid your villages for soap.

They go back to their village to feast on bronto burgers, where the primitive screwheads all marvel at Yor’s magnificent mop of blond hair, and his studly medallion. The leader tells him that he knows of another like him, a queen worshipped by the people of Fire. And before Yor can leave to go seek his destiny, they are attacked by a tribe of dusky ape-men. Kala and all the women are captured, so it is up to Yor to free them, lest they be subjected to ape-nookie. Pag grabs a crude bow and proves his mettle- that dinosaur blood must be like Viagra- by shooting many of the hairy interlopers. Yor ingeniously kills a giant bat– and uses its wings as a fucking hang glider– to invade the cave of the apemen. If the rest of the movie was that good, we’d have a cult classic like The Beastmaster on our hands. But alas, it never reaches that peak again. Once inside the villainous tribe’s cave, Yor rescues Kala and escapes by pulling rocks out of a dam inside, flooding out the apemen and probably killing all the other captured women. Oops!

Yor invents the hang glider from a dead bat

Poor Kala never gets a chance to thank him for saving her, despite her insistence. When they cross the desert to find the Queen of the Fire People, whose tribe looks like mummies rolled in dirt with giant marshmallow skewers as weapons, he’d rather get it on with his fellow Aryan, Roa. She’s quite the hottie, and they both have swingin’ ’70s medallions! But her people turn on her when he arrives, and he has to fight his way out with a flaming sword! Actually that was kind of cool. Kala is not pleased with this predicament, and tries to kill her. But the apemen show up again, and they kill Roa to save her the trouble. Before she dies, she tells him to go across the desert to the sea, to continue the quest of finding their origins.

Sadly little elfwina here has little screen time.

This time they trek to the hippie village, where once again Yor ingratiates himself by saving their asses from a dinosaur. They gift him with yet another cavegirl, this time an Asian girl. Come to think of it, Yor may actually be a porn movie with all the sex scenes removed for TV. The villagers show him a secret cave where they “killed a god from the sky” and the only remains are a headlight from an ’82 Chrysler. About five seconds later, some lasers come out of nowhere and blow up the village, causing Yor to smash the headlight- which is some sort of walkie talkie- and howl, “Stupid talking box! You are the cause of all this!”

Lasers? wtf dude! I’m a frickin caveman!

The survivors tell him of a mysterious island “always hidden by storms” from where the god from the sky and his “flying bird” may have come. So you guessed it, time to hop a boat and find the island. The island looks like the rest of Yor’s world, except as he’s sneaking around, he’s suddenly surrounded by black robots that look a lot like Darth Vader. He smashes one’s head off with a rock, but gets surrounded- which is not easy when the robots never actually move- and they shoot him with stun rays, and bring him to their leader, in their secret lair.

“Seize him!”

The androids are led by an evil bearded man in a cape named Overlord. Through him we learn that yes, they are on Earth, and they blew it up, you maniacs, damn you all to hell. Yor truly is a hunter from the future, and was one of the Rebels (sensing a pattern here?) who crashed while trying to overthrow Overlord, only to get convenient amnesia. All the other rebels are blond, too. For one time in history, the blond blue-eyed people aren’t trying to take over the planet! Needless to say, Yor kicks Overlord’s ass with some handy trapeze work and by stabbing him with what looks like a barber’s pole.

The daring young hunter from the future on the flying trapeze

Yor, The Hunter from the Future was one of many Italian low-budget movies in the ’80s that somehow made it to the American market. Another favorite of mine is The Warriors of the Wasteland, which was a Road Warrior ripoff, with exploding arrows and annoying kid. There’s always a kid in those movies; at least the Feral Child from Mad Max was unable to speak. He only communicated by throwing razor sharp boomerangs. Another good one is Super Fuzz with Terence Hill- the guy from the Trinity spaghetti westerns, and Ernest Borgnine as cops. Unfortunately, Yor is not up to that level. I can’t really give you any reason to watch it; it is completely devoid of boobies, and once the FUTURE shows up, it’s pretty lame. If they boobed it up and made it full of scenes like using severed giant bat wings as hang glider, we might have had something.

Beers Required to Enjoy: 3
Could it be remade today? I would love to see it.
Quotability Rating: Zero
Cheese Factor: Stinky Provolone
High Points: Batwing hang-glider, ahoy!
Low Point: the FUTURE!
Gratuitous Boobies: Devoid of boobie

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August 29, 2008 · 11:06 am

Death Race vs. Death Race 2000

I remember hunting down Death Race 2000 on VHS in high school with friend Pita-San. We were nerds who played “Car Wars” and this was on the required viewing list for players of that old game; we were not prepared for its dark satire, or the crazy camp. It amazed us. We did not think such movies were made. We loved it. So I was sort of excited about a remake, which could be a lot of fun- cars exploding, over the top villains, and a dark satirical future. I was sorely disappointed.

Frankenstein’s monster car

Let’s begin with the original. In a post-apocalyptic future, America is led by a brown-shirt President who blames all our problems on the French (some things never change). The populace is kept distracted by a violent cross-country road race in which drivers gain points by running down pedestrians in their suped-up, blade-festooned vehicles. Frankenstein (David Carradine) is the favorite driver- so called because he’s been in so many wrecks that most of him has been replaced. He drives a Godzilla-inspired Corvette with razor spines from nose to tail. His biggest rival is Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone), a gangster Guido with sadly inoperable tommy-guns and a huge Bowie knife mounted on his car; others include the Nazis Mathilda the Hun and Herman the German in their V-2 rocket-propelled Buzzbomb (complete with Prussian spike nosecone), Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov, Rock ‘n Roll High School) a cowgirl with longhorns on her hood, and Nero the pretty-boy, who thankfully gets killed first.

I hate Illinois Nazis.

It’s an utter campfest, as they plow through construction crews, guys playing chicken with them, and Rebels trying to sabotage the race. Frankenstein is saddled with a new navigator that he thinks is a government spy; he wants to win this last race so he can meet the President, and give him a handshake… with a “hand grenade!” Yeah, his metallic hand has a grenade built into it. There’s fake red blood galore, but it’s all well directed- the cars are sped up a little on camera, but they seem to be going pretty fast, and the stunts are decent. Whenever they aren’t racing and things get a little slow, director Paul Bartel wisely makes the girls (even his wife Mary W.!) show off their boobies. So all in all, it’s a slice of ’70s delight.


Carradine was fresh out of “Kung Fu” on TV and needed to break away from his Kwai Chang Cane character; Sly was probably raising money for Rocky, and they both chew into the roles with relish. The newscasters who follow the race are a mockery of TV talking heads, with a Howard Cosell talk-alike and others who drip with insincerity as government stooges. The budget is all spent on the goofy cars, but everyone involved goes at it with gusto. The Arnie movie The Running Man has more in common with this than the Stephen King story it’s based on, and while it’s pacing is slow for modern audiences, there’s nothing else quite like Death Race 2000. Name another movie where the doctors would roll out the elderly patients for “Euthanasia Day” only to be run over themselves. Paul Bartel knew how to make good trash, but this and Eating Raoul are his best. If you must see the “re-imagining” in theaters now, find a way to see the original.

Machine Gun Joe’s murdermobile

Death Race is a another video game movie from that master of mediocrity, who should be banned from having a name similar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s and Wes Anderson’s. Like a dog wiping his ass across the white carpet of cinema, he’s left a brown streak across the movie rack that cannot be ignored. I’ve seen Alien vs. Predator (the most boring of all the Alien films), Resident Evil (the worst of the trilogy), Event Horizon (probably the most overrated nerd-beloved film of all time, Hellraiser in space) and now Death Race, which mixes NASCAR, machine guns, and pinball in a prison movie. I’m told Soldier is saved somewhat by Kurt Russell, so I’ll rent that the next time I’ve watched too many enjoyable movies and need a letdown.

Driving my career into the toilet

There’s nothing surprising about Death Race. Ian McShane (“Deadwood,” Sitting Target) and his gravelly voice manage to uplift his scenes, but Jason Statham coasts by, having cast off any emoting ability sometime after Cellular. I loved him in Guy Ritchie’s movies, and as The Transporter, but he’s really become Vin Diesel’s grittier brother. Joan Allen (Manhunter, the Bourne Trilogy) must owe someone a favor; she’s horrible as the steely warden Hennessy, who runs the private prison with a cool and ruthless demeanor. The problem is she only has one note. Angie Dickinson in Payback: Straight Up was believable; Hennessy is not. Hearing her say nonsensical vulgarities like “Okay you, cocksucker. Fuck with me, and we’ll see who shits on the sidewalk!” is hilarious; you’d think McShane of the legendary Al Swearingen would have coached her on how to cuss!

Mad tite whip, yo

Crowd favorite Frankenstein died in his last race, so Hennessy frames ex-NASCAR driver Jensen Ames (Statham) for murder to get him to replace the masked marauder. Carradine voices Frankenstein in the opener, which was a nice touch (there are a few forgettable nods to the first movie). The rest of the drivers are all tokens- Machine Gun Joe is now a twofer, a gay black musclehead played by Tyrese Gibson (Four Brothers); 14k is the Asian nod to the ricer Fast and the Furious crowd, there’s Pachenko the Russian, a nondescript Latino dude whose job is to yell vulgarities in Spanish, and an Aryan Brotherhood guy who’ll be the bad guy among bad guys. I was hoping there’d be an obnoxious Guido driver so I could point up at the screen and say, “hurr! he’s like me! I can now relate to this story!” They also bus in women prisoners so the gals have someone to cheer, but they are only allowed to serve as navigators- McCain must be president in 2012. The lithe ladies all have boomboxes in their cooches, which play riffs if they sway their hips in slow motion while they walk on screen. I must get Firecracker one of those. Natalie Martinez plays Frankenstein’s navigator Case, so maybe it’s just something hot Latinas are born with.

We need more uniforms like this in women’s prison

This movie is all about the action, but it’s mostly boring. Armored cars with machine-guns, flamethrowers and rocket launchers hammer at each other as they lap the track, which has Power Ups (they’re actually called this) scattered around it, like Mario Kart meets Twisted Metal. The guns barely seem to hurt the cars’ armor, and most kills are of the crash & explode variety. PWSA tries to up the gore factor now and then, but it’s bad CG the few times we see a pedestrian get plowed. We actually see a guy explode as soon as a car touches him, for example; I’d rather have fake red blood on an actual stunt man, thanks. During the final lap, Hennessy releases “the Dreadnought,” a tricked out semi with a tank gun, and its wheels have those spinning blades we’ve seen a dozen times- the token Asian’s navigator gets chewed up by it, which involves her jiggling in her seat with her tongue hanging out. The driver doesn’t even get blood on him. It would have been funnier if we just heard her scream and see him get splattered with her innards, but you can’t expect clever from this Anderson.

The infamous hand grenade!

The ending seems like an afterthought and I think PWSA (pronounced Pwissa) wrote it on toilet paper in between grunts. It’s as if they ran out of time, needed a prison break, and then forgot that they didn’t kill the evil warden. When they do escape in their death cars, try not to roll your eyes when the guards chase them in regular old police cars, as if escape never crossed their minds; the cars are all rigged with kill switches on the weapons, but Hennessy never imagined they could be bypassed. They chase them with helicopters across the only bridge off the prison island, which is protected by … a chain link fence. Even prisons that don’t hold death races have better security than this. But we ran out of time, so they need to escape easily. So much for finales.

How the remake feels!

Jason Statham, what’s gotten into you? It’s an easy paycheck, I know. I really liked The Transporter. If you can’t tell what made that more fun than the latest string of movies you’ve made, fire your agent before you lose any remaining cred. We’ll always have Turkish.

And as a bonus here are two photos from Death Race 2000 that look like they’re from an S&M movie, or a Batman porno.

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August 13, 2008 · 6:22 pm

Doomsday – Rhona Mitra vs. Punkapocalyptica

The post-apocalyptic movies of the ’80s had a few things going for them- we were at the tail end of the Cold War, and thousands of nuclear warheads were aimed at everybody. Now, they’re just decrepit and unaccounted for. Also, there had been an oil crisis in the ’70s and we were all concerned about fighting over it. Wait a minute. Does this mean… a new crop of post-apocalyptic movies could be at hand? Doomsday by Neil Marshall, who gave us the delightful low-budget werewolf blast Dog Soldiers and one of the best horror movies of recent years, The Descent, decides to test the waters with a little bit of 28 Days Later sprinkled on familiar classics such as Escape from New York and The Road Warrior. And mostly, it succeeds- it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Steve Martin, eat your heart out.

After a deadly outbreak of the Reaper Virus, which gives you giant warts on your face before you puke blood-snot and die, the British government seals off Scotland for 30 years to contain the virus. After a new outbreak in London, a wily female operative and her mostly stupid comrades are sent in to find a scientist named Kane, who may have a cure or vaccine. It’s not quite clear. What is clear is that London has devolved into a criminal shithole reminiscent of the future represented in stuff like Ghost in the Shell, which also has a cybernetically enhanced hottie protagonist. Here, Major Eden Sinclair lost an eye as a child, when her mother sacrificed her life to get to da choppa!!! and save her from the virus. And now she’s going back to kick some viral ass.



In 2035 Britain is shunned by the world for its Machiavellian solution to the plague. “Nip/Tuck” siren Rhona Mitra plays Major Sinclair, the black-clad super-cop leading the mission; her boss is the burly bristly badger Bob Hoskins, operating on orders from sleazy politicians who fear both uprisings and outbreaks. It soon becomes clear that if they can let an outbreak burn through areas rife with unrest, they’ll do it instead of decreasing the poll tax or raising the dole or whatever they do over there instead of bread and circuses. Chips and tellies.

Eyepatches are hot. I’d raid her booty.


They send her to see what the Scots have done in 30 years of isolation and total breakdown of civilization; the survivors seem immune, but are they carriers? Sadly, the inventors of such culinary breakthroughs as the deep-fried Mars Bar have not fared well, and having run out of haggis, they now resort to cannibalism. Our intrepid heroes roll in with two big troop carriers straight out of Damnation Alley, and get struck by a horde of Post-Apocalyptic Punks as soon as they leave the safety of their vehicles. Thanks to that One Stupid Guy who has to help a teen waif in a heroin haze, they are all slaughtered in guerrilla style with Molotov cocktails, spiked cricket bats, and makeshift weapons. It’s like Aliens in Chechnya.

Damnation Alley meets Aliens in Chechnya

Sol, the leader of the cannibalistic tribes, definitely resembles Wez from the Mad Max movies, and his hordes seem to have modeled things after post-apocalyptic movies they watched as kids. Believable enough. In a gunless society everyone resorts to knives, swords, clubs, crossbows and cudgels. Sinclair gets captured but two of her men lay low; the cannibal punks beat her up and ask her questions, but apparently draw the line at punching you hard. We soon learn that they’re just tenderizing the meat, as another captive gets roasted alive on stage. They don’t even gut him first, or make haggis. They throw Eden a chunk of him. “If you’re hungry, have a piece of your friend.”

I eat cannibals…

The film manages some controlled gore but doesn’t go over the top, especially for a bunch of cannibals; the Reavers from Serenity were much more savage. Not that your bloodlust won’t be sated by the Unrated version, which has headshots galore. I wondered how they chose the next meal, if no one’s arrived in 30 years, and everyone seems to be in their mid-20′s. Did they eat their parents? We’ll find the Castle for Adult Living, later. Sinclair escapes in a brutal swordfight with Sol’s mohawk-sporting girlfriend, dragging along another female prisoner who turns out to be his sister. They go to find dear old Dad, who turns out to be the scientist Kane they went to find in the first place.

Scantily clad women swordfighting? Count me in!

A lot of internet nerds think it all went pear-shaped here, when they run into Kane’s people, who are dressed and armed like medieval knights and peasants, and live in a fortified castle only reachable through an underground bunker. It was fine with me; I never asked where the Humongous and company found all that S&M gear in The Road Warrior, why should I ask how they learned medieval armory skills? A shield looks like it’s made from sheet metal scrap, so it’s not too hard to imagine. Kane is played by Malcolm MacDowell as a tyrant bent on bringing back serfdom, and the movie makes it none too clear that the rulers on the outside only differ in their methods.

Her abs are only slightly harder than his armor.

There’s a great duel between Sinclair and an armored knight with a morningstar, but Marshall’s supposedly inspirational vision- of a modern or futuristic soldier facing a knight in armor- is never to be. Which is probably for the better, as I’m not sure how cheesy that would be. I imagine they’d have decided to make the armor bulletproof, when the reason it fell out of fashion was because it most certainly was not. We get plenty of action besides, with a final chase worthy of a Mad Max film, with a bunch of British vehicles done up in punk-apocalyptic garb vs. a Bentley GT. Too bad Sol couldn’t scavenge up a Jaguar XKE- they manage to catch them anyway, this being a movie.

Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?

Of course it’s derivative, but let’s face it, the last movie of this type I can remember is Escape from L.A., which was fun but had a bit too much camp for my liking. Doomsday may not be a classic, but it’s certainly entertaining. The ending shows that Major Eden Sinclair could be pals with Snake Plissken, and sets us up for a possible sequel that I doubt we’ll ever see. That’s too bad, because I’d watch it. The movie’s flaws are minor- the cliche dumb guy who gets the team killed, and offing one of our favorite characters- the only guy who seems competent- to drum up some emotion in the third act.

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July 11, 2008 · 12:40 pm

Last Night – Remember Y2k?

I’d been meaning to see this for years- a low-key, end of the world movie from Canada that was more about how people would react to knowing the world was ending and when, than how it would end. It was more akin to the great 80′s sleeper Miracle Mile than silly stuff like Armageddon. It manages to be quite gripping by not showing or telling us what’s coming, but letting us live with a small group of people and their last days on Earth.

“This is the way the world ends- not with a bang, but a whimper.”

T.S. Eliot’s elegiac chorus from his poem “The Hollow Men” has become almost hackneyed in repetition, but Don McKellar took it to heart when he wrote and directed Last Night, a wistful look at the final 6 hours of a small group of people, and of course, the entire world. This is a more cerebral end of the world picture, reminiscent of The Quiet Earth in ways. In Toronto, we meet a small family preparing for the world to end in 6 hours, at midnight. The older mother and father are hosting a gathering, like a final Christmas send-off; their son Patrick (McKellar) becomes the link between the other folks we meet. He wants to spend the final time alone, listening to music in his apartment.

Lonesome Patrick


His friend is racking up final sexual conquests, while a woman (Sandra Oh) tries to meet with her husband for a one last romantic dinner, but he’s still at work, calling customers of the gas company to reassure them that they will keep the gas running until the bitter end. How civilized. Of course others run amok, and the loneliness and desperation of an inevitable, unavoidable demise rests heavily on everyone’s shoulders. The film creates a singular mood that is quite compelling, and the actors are well suited, culled from the incestuous Canadian film industry. David Cronenberg plays the gas company man, with surprising talent. The film is charming in how people cling to societal conventions even in the face of apocalypse.

Sandra does some last-minute shopping.

Patrick meets Sandra in the street, after he car is vandalized and she waits on the trolley for a driver who will never come. A mother and child wait stubbornly on the train, unable to realize that the system has already fallen apart. Patrick decides to help Sandra get to her husband, and tries to borrow a car from some friends- but they need it for a violin recital. You see, he’s finally got a chance to play at the orchestra, and would you like to come? Not if it was the last day on Earth, apparently. These subtle jokes keep the tone from becoming too depressing, and gives us a chance for a little introspection and inevitable dinner conversation after it’s over- what would you do?

Patrick knows his sex-hungry friend has a few cars; but he is loathe to part with any of them, because he wants to die with a classic car collection. And two is not a collection; that’s just a guy with two cars. He who dies with the most toys wins, not just a bumper sticker, but a way of life.

We never learn what’s causing Earth’s sudden destruction at midnight, except that it’s been constant daylight for the past 6 months. No night, no stars; an arctic summer for everyone in Toronto, at least. It made me wonder what things were like on the other side of the world, with six months of darkness, or if the world was heading into the sun; it’s never explained, which is good, because it’s not meant to be a science fiction picture like The Quiet Earth. It’s a good drama with some mild laughs and epiphanies, and it really drew me in to feel for the characters. A nice chance of pace from your typical end of the world film.

The movie came out in 1998, when many people were concerned about with millennial doomsday predictions, or the anticlimactic concerns over computer malfunctions. Countries that spent millions in preparation seemed to fare as well as those who didn’t, but the turning of the great odometer inspired a slew of disaster movies. This is the anti-disaster movie, and a good way to spend some time, thinking about what you’d do; better than similar pap like The Bucket List, anyway.

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