Kids Vs. Aliens (2023) - Movie Review

With how well Thanksgiving turned out, I figured it’d be worthwhile to check out what another Grindhouse alumnus has been up to. And oddly enough, this one also involves turning a short film into a full feature (albeit still a short one at around 70 minutes). After winning his way into the Grindhouse project with the fake trailer for Hobo With A Shotgun (which got a pretty kick-arse feature adaptation in his own right), his next feature is a fleshing-out of Slumber Party Alien Abduction, a segment he made for the V/H/S/2 anthology.

Sisu (2023) - Movie Review

2023 has already seen action cinema reach some amazing heights, from the high-art elevation of John Wick: Chapter 4, to the western shonen sports drama of Creed III, even the one-take shoot-out scene in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. So when a film like Sisu comes out, it can’t help but feel slight, even if that is somewhat by design. It is by and large as simple and straight-forward as an action flick gets: Man finds gold, Nazis find man, Nazis try and take gold, man makes them regret it.

It’s a 90-minute feature that is so lean, it’s possible that quite a bit of usable meat was thrown away in the attempt to remove all traces of fat from the cut. But then again, even if it is just a thin excuse to have our stoic action lead cut, shoot, and blow up Nazis for an hour and a half… well, there’s never not a good time for such things, right?

Lucky Day (2020) - Movie Review

Time for a step into genre weirdness as we look at what can only be described as the closest we’ll ever get to an ‘official’ Tarantino knock-off. Writer/director Roger Avary worked quite closely with Tarantino himself in the ‘90s, doing both credited and uncredited work on Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and even Tarantino’s writer-only gigs with True Romance and Natural Born Killers. With Tarantino seemingly hitting the twilight of his career, given his latest felt like a loving goodbye letter to the medium he adores, I’d argue that there might be some use out of a production like this as a further testament to that legacy. But that’s not the result we get, though.

Antebellum (2020) - Movie Review

Bear with me on this one, because I’m feeling a bit apprehensive about writing a review for this particular movie. As I have been making a regular habit of mentioning around here, I am a suburban white dude from Sydney, Australia, and while I don’t shy away from discussing rather grisly topics over the course of these reviews… gotta admit, being able to do justice to the American original sin that is slavery has always felt like one of my blind spots. I mean, I’m as far away from knowing the first-hand black experience as it’s possible to get, and I have certain fears that my takes about a given film to do with the topic might end up trivialising this aspect of that experience. And that's something I really want to be careful about when discussing Antebellum, which mishandles the topic worse than any other film I've covered on here.

Overlord (2018) - Movie Review

 

There was a time when saying that Nazis are bad wouldn’t have been met with so much resistance. There was a time when seeing Captain America punch Hitler in the face wouldn’t have drawn accusations on the artists being SJWs. There was a time when recognising that the Nazis are responsible for some of the greatest atrocities in human history was the least controversial statement a person could make. But it seems that, in an age where white supremacy is a hot-button issue, that time is not now. Many people aren’t exactly happy with this idea, myself included, and that is why this film is such a delightfully demented breath of fresh air.

Jesus, Bro! (2017) - Movie Review

In the year of some people’s Lord 2014, something happened. A film by the name of God’s Not Dead was released by PureFlix Entertainment. After seeing the rather intense reactions to it online, I checked it out for myself. I didn’t like it. At all. Here’s my review on just how much wrong is contained within. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: It’s a bad movie, something we get a lot of year-in and year-out. However, this was decidedly different because God’s Not Dead apparently stuck such a chord with both its defenders and its detractors that it spawned, as put aptly by critic and filmmaker Brad Jones, “a golden age of a different kind of exploitation film”.

 

Over the next three years, a slew of similar Christian-oriented cinema began to spring up, from the hardcore apologetics of Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas to the seemingly unaware sexism of War Room right down to the furthering of dangerous narrative of God’s Not Dead 2. Brad himself has covered several of these films on video, either in character as the Cinema Snob or just giving his immediate post-watching thoughts for his Midnight Screenings series. However, it seems that his interest in the subject still can’t be sated so he went all-out and made a feature-length production to mock the hell out of this sub-genre. But how did it turn out?

Top 20 Diamanda Hagan Reviews

She’s an official friend of the blog, she gave me my first ever podcast appearance (and my second), she’s probably one of the few proper allies I have within the realm of media criticism. And yet, if you are ever unfortunate to catch me watching one of her videos concerning Doctor Who, you would see fanboy rage the likes of which even God has never seen before. Seriously, if I lacked any form of perspective, I could easily make up a Top 10 Worst Videos list made up of her Twatty Who Reviews. But this is something I’ve even talked with her before on the podcast, so this is hardly anything new. So, with that little dummy spit out of the way, let’s get into the list already.

Freak Out (2003) - Movie Review

While the semi-recent phenomenon brought up by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse project, complete with fake trailers that for some reason show some of the best of their respective directors’ work (seriously, I want to see a full-length version of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving), modern-day exploitation is far from a new thing. And long before he’d end up making a career out of mocking old-school cinema involving nuns, Nazis and cannibals, Brad Jones was doing much the same. From his snuff film thriller Cheap to his more recent efforts like the Italian giallo homages in The Cinema Snob Movie, you get a definite impression that the man has a clear admiration for this style of filmmaking. So, in what I’m sure is going to be me playing the long game, let’s take a look at his (available) filmography starting with one of the earliest productions to come out of Stoned Gremlin.

Top 20 Cinema Snob Episodes

The entire show is a big extended joke on how ridiculously smug and wrong-headed some of the more popular film critics can get. A joke that was apparently so funny that, especially nowadays, he constantly feels the need to wink at the audience to tell them that it’s just a joke… time after time after bloody time. Look, I get that Internet fandoms don’t exactly spawn the most rational creatures (case in point: this entire bleeding month) but it’s rather unsettling that he would become so jaded by comments to take this course of action. That, and he dares to mock my Lord and Saviour, but we’ll get to that later in the month. In the meantime, I’m counting down the 20 best episodes of The Cinema Snob.

The Green Inferno (2015) - Movie Review

I’ve talked before about the confounding writing trend in horror films that says that, because most of the characters are going to die anyway, we shouldn’t be made to have any emotional connection to them. As such, the majority of the main cast is written to be hateful by whatever way possible, usually through the exhibition of utterly misanthropic behaviour. Well, the director of today’s film is one of the forefathers of the style in today’s cinema: Eli Roth. He is also supposedly responsible for the almost-hilariously misnamed ‘torture porn’ sub-genre, alongside James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Now, even though his films may contain some of the most loathsome core characters in film, I do not think he is a bad filmmaker; after all, there were parts of Hostel that I could get into and his work with RZA made for a surprisingly entertaining flick with The Man With The Iron Fists. Well, since this is his first time in the director’s chair since he made the Thanksgiving fake trailer for the Grindhouse film project, easily the best work of his career, let’s see if he has grown at all in that time as he creates an homage to the 80’s Amazon Cannibal sub-genre.