Firecracker (1981)

My most recent foray into action/exploitation. This one directed by Cirio H. Santiago who has what seems like an unlimited filmography in this category. This is right up there with one of his more entertaining.

There is absolutely no plot or character development in this one. They just get right into it. Basically a girl goes to the Philippines to find her sister who disappeared. She runs into drug dealers and even a Bloodsport type martial arts tournament where people fight to the death. She just happens to be a tiny gorgeous blonde who is a master of martial arts played by Jillian Kesner. She kicks ass through out the film both clothes on and off while she tries to find out what happened to her sister. This movie was super entertaining and the actress was super attractive. Not sure how this didn't become a series of movies or why she wasn't a bigger star. She was in some other exploitation and horror films but in smaller rolls. I have been on a roll with watching some entertaining films and this was no acception.

Anyone Else Keep a Movie Seen List?

I got bored one day and decided to make an Excel spreadsheet tracking all the movies I've seen over the years. 2013 is when I started keeping track, and older ones as I remember.
Right now I'm up to 2760 movies seen.

What I have listed on the spreadsheet are:
Movie title with IMDB link
Year of release
My rating out of 10
IMDB rating at date of listing
Movie run time
MPAA rating
Medium viewed in
First three genres listed on IMDB
Primary genre (in my opinion)
Date first watched
Plot synopsis

Then I also have tabulations at the bottom tracking number each year, decade, medium, MPAA rating primary genre, and personal rating. And also a few time watched computation totals (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years).
By the by, just over half a year on what I know of.

Anyone else lead this boring a life?

Lore Podcaat

A couple years ago I was looking for a horror podcast to listen to while at work, and I came across Lore.
It delves into bizarre and true stories from around the world. Most of the ones I listened to had a dark edge to them. Some had a sharp edge, especially axes.
Some are about well-known stories, such as the Jersey Devil and Lizzie Borden. Others are some I never heard of.
They range from 30 minutes to an hour. Check it out if interested
And when you do, make sure you say hi to Aaron Mahnke. He likes it when people say hi.

Boss Level

I wont go into too much detail, but I've always liked Frank Grillo. He is one smooth motherfucker and I love seeing him be bad-ass. Mel Gibson doesn't have as meaty of a role as he did in Fatman, but put him in any movie and it'll be better. The science behind the time-loop is negligable compared to the action and comedy it provides, but at this point, is there anything more to say about time-loop movies? The protagonist goes through trial and error, tries to be a better person, yada yada...

Groundhogs Day was gold. Premature was moderately amusing. Edge of Tomorrow was fuckin' great. Happy Death Day was surprisingly decent. Happy Death Day 2 sucked... Fortunately, this movie proves that a misstep can be corrected, and while it isn't mindblowing, it takes a lot of its cues from video games, and the end result is highly watchable, if not inconclusive.

Mad Foxes (1981)

All I can say is wow. Can't believe it took me this long to watch. One the best bad movies I have seen in a long time. This movie should be the poster child of a board like this. It is so badly hilarious at times with the acting, dubbing and scenarios and then other times amazingly brutal with its violence.

I actually started to watch this on Tubi the other day but then looked into it and found out it was edited. The only unedited version I could find was the DVD directly through Full Moon so I picked it up. It was only $7.99 and they even threw a free DVD in with it. I was enjoying the edited version but some things didn't make sense. After watching the uncut version a few things were cleared up despite most of the movie still making no sense. 😃

Anywho without getting into many specifics or spoilers there is a studly playboy who runs into a Nazi biker gang. They proceed to get revenge on one another and the revenge gets more extreme as it goes. Besides the playboy and Nazis there is a karate gang, plenty of naked girls and guys for that matter, some castration and much more. A must see for any fan of trash cinema.

Nuke 'Em High, Part II

After the school was destroyed in the first movie, it's only natural that, for entertainment's sake, the school be rebuilt and merged with the nuclear power plant. Our protagonist is a beefcake named Roger who everybody views as a stupid nerd, which is pretty funny. He finds love with a woman named Victoria, who happens to be a subhumanoid with a mouth on her belly button, capable of melting down into a pile of green slime at any point!

I've been told that this movie sucks, but I was pretty entertained the whole damn time. It's very much in the vein of a Lloyd Kaufman directed movie, even though he served more as a writer/producer. Everyone is batshit crazy, dressed like punks and weirdos, and the women are completely objectified. Everyone gets covered in blood and slime, they're all dumb as shit, and I'm completely content with all of this.

It's funny how the main character always talks to his recorder, addressing it as Diane. This was around the same time that Twin Peaks came out, so it can very well be an homage or coincidence. I've always thought that Lisa Gaye is pretty sexy and ridiculous at the same time with her snooty bee-haviour and bee-hive hairdo. I looked her up and saw that she reprises her role in the next movie, as well as a 2020 Lloyd Kaufman film "Shakespeare's Shitstorm". So Lloyd actually directed a movie recently?!

Also, the film is part Godzilla movie, only instead of a giant lizard, it's a giant mutated Squirrel. It's Troma-riffic.

#Review

Books with Bambi and Snowy! 

Hey guys, Bambi and I have started a book club, and are also becoming book bloggers to try and get more people reading! If y'all have a Facebook can you go like the page Bookswithbambiandsnowy. And if you have an Instagram ours is @bookswithbambiandsnowy!

If you guys aren't a fan of reading, could you please share the posts! We would reallly appreciate it!

Also we will promote trashepics on our discussions for horror novels!

L.A. Wars (1994)

Just watched LA Wars as I grabbed the Vinegar Syndrome release a while back. If you are into action/exploitation you need to see it now. Right up there with Action USA as cheesy gold. It has everything from over the top gun violence, martial arts, boobs, ridiculous 90s attire, and your typical 90s meat head in the lead role. The exchanges with him and his captain are hilarious. They are almost straight out of the ones they made fun of in the Last Action Hero but they were trying to be serious. Anywho Vinegar Syndrome knocked it out of the park with this one.

Limitless (2011)

I just saw this movie for the first time, two or three days ago. I guess I had heard of it, and maybe vaguely knew the general idea, but somehow I missed seeing it.

I liked it! The WAY they shot the movie is borderline spectacular... it has lots of very cool shots that I think might be called fractal... the camera appears to be zooming in and in and in for MILES along a city street, and the central point in the frame keeps expanding until it moves beyond you and you seem to be within it, and then the new central point just keeps expanding. It just suggested what was happening to the main character, from his point of view... he was getting insanely higher levels of perception and awareness of detail, when he took a certain drug... I'll get to that later. Anyway, I also liked the way the colors (do you say the "palette?") changed, whenever he took the drug. When he was his normal, ordinary, average slob of a loser of a self, all the colors in every setting were sort of grayish blue... it made me think of the colors of most scenes in The Ring... it was almost like he was underwater all the time. Then he takes the drug, and almost instantly all the colors he sees become BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT super vivid, fill of warm reds and yellows, like a sunny day in a flower garden.... suddenly everyone's skin looks very healthy and youthful... basically his whole world becomes exponentially more enjoyable and more fun to live in, whenever he takes the drug. I hope this movie didn't prompt too many people to get really into drugs, now that I'm thinking about this... for me, even coffee is usually more than enough. Yikes.

Anyway, as most of us here probably already know, the idea of the movie is that a pretty regular guy who happens to live in New York City, and tells people he is a writer although he never actually writes anything... this dude more or less accidentally bumps into an old acquaintance who gives him a drug, and it makes him... I don't know, maybe ten or twenty times smarter. The point being that he becomes MUCH smarter, so much smarter that... it's just impossible. Suddenly he can learn languages in just a few hours or days, and remembers every line of every book he was forced to read in college, and is super gregarious and sociable, and finds math to be an absolute blast, and can understand significant PATTERNS in the stock market, and can write the great American novel in just a few days... and luckily, he also happens to be Bradley Cooper, so all the ladies find everything he does to be super attractive and interesting.

The downside of all this is that the drug wears off after a while, and he needs to stay jacked or he REALLY crashes, and could even die. So, he needs a constant supply. Also, there is some kind of hit man stalking him. He knows this has something to do with the drug, but he isn't really clear on exactly why for most of the movie. ALSO, he ends up having ANOTHER hit man stalking him (well, a Russian loan shark and the loan shark's henchmen), because he was so overconfident and manic when he was on the drug that he got involved with this loan shark just to get his hands on more money, faster than he could otherwise.

Other plotlines involve his off and on girlfriend, who has serious qualms about this drug, and also his budding career in the corporate/Wall Street world. He also meets his ex wife, who has had some experience with the drug and who was so frightened by it, and so negatively affected by her withdrawal from it, that she seems to have aged thirty years, and just wants to spend the rest of her life hiding from everything, probably curled up in a fetal position as much as possible. She is a disturbing and spooky character to see, but she gives him some important advice that I think helps him to survive.

This is very much a New York City movie, by the way... As a Massachusetts guy, I have always enjoyed the similar movies Good Will Hunting and Charly (a Cliff Robertson adaptation of Flowers for Algernon that they filmed in Boston, in the late 60s). But, Limitless is VERY NYC. I have mixed feelings about this, just like I do about how many movies take place in L.A. The fact that Eddie (the main character) lives in NYC means he very quickly meets global titans of finance and industry, and that he has hundreds or even thousands of bars and nightclubs he can go to to meet random women. I kept thinking, if this movie took place in a normal small town, I'm not sure if his life would actually change very much no matter how much smarter he got. Most of us are sort of fenced in by various obligations, and our lives wouldn't necessarily change very much even in the circumstances shown in the movie. Soooo that's depressing as fuck.

OK, that gets me thinking... one thing that makes this movie work is that Eddie is basically a likeable guy, who just got dumped by his girlfriend. He seems basically decent and honest, and nice, if not necessarily incredibly smart, and watching the movie, you just root for him and you want his life to get better. So... yeah, the factthat he just got dumped by his girlfriend, is on the verge of getting kicked out of his apartment, and is going nowhere career-wise means that he is more open to sudden, huge changes in his life than most of us would be, no matter where we live. Soooo.... yeah, whatever that means.

So, just in general, this is a fun movie, a good thriller, and clearly it got under my skin enough that I'm writing this long review/commentary. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out! Kirk out.

Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)

This movie is almost competent. It seems like some crap Anchor Bay might have put out back in the day, and that crap was always pretty awesome either way. This movie has some charm to it, but only a little.

The plot is brilliant though. A guy sleeps around with the housewives of suburbia, unknowingly spreading his VD that turns women (who have had children, mind you) into some very very hungry women. They're almost zombies, but not braindead enough. Furthermore, they look like rip-offs of Fright Night vampires, but before I could draw that comparison, I saw them more as a prelude to Jack Nicholson's Joker with their frozen grin faces.

Mildly entertaining. Funnier yet is that this movie was released around the same time as Troma's Rabid Grannies. Should I bother with that one?