Tornado: The Last Blood (1983)

For some quick and sleazy war points, I saw the poster art for some shitty Italian looking war movie with a Rambo-esque title and I was immediately sold. This is the original "Last Blood", unlike Stallone's upcoming 5th Rambo entry, which will undoubtedly be loads better than this spaghetti war flick.

Granted, this movie isn't very much like First Blood, but it does have a heroic cliche who is stepped on by his commanding officers to the point where he fights back. However, this quickly leads to a court marshall, and he's sent to prison, but the transfer vehicle is attacked, and he's got to survive the enemy territory of the Nam!


Funny enough, this movie is thematically more similar to Rambo: First Blood Part II, which wouldn't come out until a couple years later. This is mainly due to the story actually being set in Nam, but you can tell that this movie had nothing original to say about any of it. This is just Italy's way of jumping on another bandwagon, and the result is exactly what you'd expect: dumb, dubbed, shoddy, and somehow watchable.

I don't really have much to say about this movie, but it's definitely trash. Currently available on Prime.

Roman's song

TrashEpics is the place to be

I've never ranted on here, and now is as good a time as any.

A few days ago, I said that a lack of activity wouldn't bother me.
I guess I was hoping "filmboards" would fill in some activity-gaps. Mistakenly so.

Back in March, a friend of mine said that one of our friends (much like myself) is the Soapbox-type. Which Soapbox would that be? They're all equally dead.

In the words of Rocky in Rocky 3, "How did everything good get so bad?"
I'm not sure I buy the social-media theory. I'm not convinced.

There's definitely more here than meets the eye.
I've been to offbeat sites (such as annoyatorium.com). They're annoying.
I've been to obscure sites (such as broadwayworld.com). They're boring.

Clearly, what's happening here is that they all went to "TheFappening.com" (and lived fappily ever after).

The best damn Nam movie ever: Platoon (1986)

When you're a young enthusiastic film buff, you try to see the basics, no matter what the genre. Coppola, Kubric, Scorsese, Scorsaza... When IMDb meant something, their Top 250 was a good reference for the classics. In retrospect, it wasn't good at all, because the system was so damn weighted because people abused the system, but even before it went to shit, you come across some legitimate old school cinematic wonders, and some of them are mindblowers.

In the early days of my blind-buying dvd adventures, I went with a star-studded war film by Oliver Stone and Orion Pictures. What I ended up with was some top-10 material, because Platoon is one hell of a movie.

1986 was a time when a lot of great movies were being made. A lot of great actors were getting their starts, and they had to go through Oliver Stone's boot camp to get it. In a way, you have to respect them for that, because it makes the acting a hell of a lot more real. You believe these people, and you have a haunting horrors-of-war story wrapped around their stint in hell.

There are all sorts of sides to the war, but in the end, it's still filled with people, and people have all sorts of conflicting agendas. The characters struggle to cope with fighting not only the VC, but their own side as well.

A lot of war mishaps revolve around orders and higher-ups and this movie shows the divide. These characters can be awful, but they're still the "heroes", and they have nothing to look forward to. Goddamn, it would be an awful thing to fight in a war. I consider myself truly blessed to not have to deal with any of that shit, but it's also important in the sense of learning from those harsh lessons and knowing your place in this world, and how awful things can be if you don't play by the rules.


Charlie Sheen was such a newb in this movie, but he's there to represent the cherry in all of us. I also love how his narration clashes with Martin Sheen's narration in Hot Shots Part Deux, which is also a great (not-quite) war movie.

So many people in this movie... Johnny Depp plays the translator in a small but decent role. Forest Whitaker, Tony Todd, Keith David, John C. McGinley, Kevin Dillon, and a bunch of others are there, but Tom Berenger is so damn intense. Love that makeup, too.

I love the visuals, and how the shots kind of look like lasers sometimes, in that old Orion sort of way. The whole thing is wonderfully crafted, but the performances and characters are all you have to hold onto in a war movie. Everyone in it has moments of good and bad, heroism and horror-show, and there's no black and white for any of these characters, even though the movie has a lot of black people AND white people, and a lot of mexicans and yellows. Even though these characters had to work with each other in the oft involuntary fight on the other side of the world... they don't really have to like each other.

Some of these scenes haunted me. I used to watch this movie all the time because it stuck with me so much, and it can still pack a punch. Namely the village scene and Elias's scene. War crimes galore, and this wasn't even the worst of 'em. Just wait till you see Casualties of War!

Platoon is fucking awesome. My favorite war movie.

Journey to the end of the night (2006)

Note: I tried to add a movie image or cover, but didn't figure out how. Ah, well...

Journey to the end of the night is about the tense relationship between a father and son who run a club in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

On one night, Russo and Paul's so-so fortunes are supposed to change, as they have a man named Baaba contracted (as a drug-mule) for a huge payoff.
However, things begin to awry when Baaba has a fatal heart attack while fucking a tranny.
This potentially screws things up, since it happens the night before the drug run. Ironically (slightly later on), the same problematic tranny has an altercation with Russo's son Paul, in which a bottle is thrown into a window, cutting Paul's head. Small world, ain't it?

This film stars Scott Glenn and Brendan Fraser, but also stars Catalina Moreno as a prostitute-turned-wife (Russo's), who is having an affair with Paul.

There are many double-crosses (especially from Paul), including a scene in which he has a guide-dog killed in an attempt to extract information.

In Journey to the end of the night, it's dog eat dog, as this film pulls no punches in it's portrayal of a deeply-troubled love triangle.

The Midsommar madness of Ari Aster

About a year after creeping me right the fuck out with Hereditary, Ari Aster went in another similar direction with this bizarre trip to a Swedish cult festival in "Midsommar". The artistic direction is pretty wonderful, much in the same vein as the last movie, and the weirdness is way up there. Both movies share a lot of similar themes, and it only gets more obvious toward the end of the movie.

The movie is quite long at almost 2.5 hours, but throughout the film, you'll get a few shocking moments. In typical Aster fashion, the film has some fucked up imagery, and an unsettling vibe throughout. We start the movie with a traumatic experience, and while the comedy lingers about in the first half, the horror drowns it out in a strangely fascinating and uncomfortable viewing experience.

Our characters are pretty decent, with our lead actress putting on a range of sad emotions throughout. She's drawn into this festival after her uncommitted leech of a boyfriend ((not) played by Chris Pratt) is set to travel with his friends there to write a thesis on their rituals. What could go wrong?

This one is another slow-burner that culminates to a Wicker-Man/Hereditary event where all these friendly commune types prove to have a more sinister Children of the Corn style of living.

One thing I really liked about the movie was its use of hallucinogenic drugs. They take a few of them throughout, and the trippy look of things is quite awesome. You see the trees moving and breathing, the grass swaying and blending in, and the world has waves to it. Perhaps the best drug trippery I've ever seen in a movie.


Overall, it was a pretty good movie. My initial viewing still places Hereditary on a higher pedestal, but fans of that movie should have no trouble in getting into this deranged picture. Again, this movie almost seems to retread some of the same ideas as the last movie, with cultists, weird mythologies, reincarnation, and directorial quirks. I'm always happy to see classy horror like this make it into cinemas.

I done it again!

I just went on another splurge and brought in a big haul. I need to stop as I am running out of room! 😲

How did I do?..

One Missed Call 2003
Gia 1998
Hair Extensions 2007
Perfect Sense 2011
Slaughterhouse-Five 1972
Snowtown 2011
The Zero Theorem 2013
Mandy 2018
Adaptation. 2002
Lucy 2014
Powder 1995
Premonition 2004
I Am Legend 2007
He Was a Quiet Man 2007
Maléfique 2002
Tattoo 2002
The Ninth Configuration 1980
Project X 2012
247°F 2011
Tony 2009
All Good Things 2010
Dead & Breakfast 2004
The Nameless 1999
Interstellar 2014
mother! 2017
Devil's Knot 2013
Bonnie and Clyde 1967
Brazil 1985
Silent Running 1972
The Reaping 2007
Equals 2015
Attack the Block 2011
Summer of Sam 1999
Here Comes the Devil 2012
Let Me In 2010
The Possession 2012
The Midnight Meat Train 2008
Willow Creek 2013
The Awakening 2011
Roseville 2013
Rigor Mortis 2013
Under the Shadow 2016
The Signal 2014
Sleep Tight 2011
The Experiment 2001
Kalifornia 1993
Undead 2003
Eat 2014
The Boston Strangler 1968
Chained 2012
Pyewacket 2017
Project Almanac 2015
The Woman in Black 2012
Walkabout 1971

Random thoughts

David said that there are days when not a single post is posted.
That won't be a problem for me, especially since I have 2 year's worth of catching up to do.

It's not just that.
When IMDb shut down 2 years ago, we all had a high-level of expectation, as far as activity goes.
But by now, that expectation has severely diminished.

Kudos to David for having a bug-free site (or seemingly).
So many sites are down from time to time, due to bugs.
Also, in the words of the late-great Ray Bradbury, "I'll never starve here".

Hank HillRaiser

Had to share. For those of us from outside the US, this is a character from a cartoon called King of the Hill.
https://twitter.com/1AshleyLaurence/status/1146417879643901954

Where have all those regulars gone?

We used to have some more regular contributers here who posted some good shit, then vanished off the face of the earth. People like BarkingBaphomet, Shadow-345, iceflamez, Atomichotwings, klownz, RedHawk10, sethyeah, slasherfan85, AlcoholicNinja, Moffat, and all those others who rarely/never posted, but at least lurked. Anybody know what hole they all crawled into?

I'd think that some of the political talk scared 'em off, but even after the government calmed down and there was no talk of this shit, that didn't seem to make a difference anymore. People stayed gone, and things got a bit stagnant.

So where did they all migrate to? Internet addicts like that don't simply "get a life" and move on, or move to facebook. Most of the aforementioned users don't even frequent the other imdb knockoff sites, so wtf happened to the age of internet forums? How do we get that back? How do we bring the old blood back here, and how do we get new blood?

I think of this stuff sometimes, and it makes me sad. I miss the days when there was too much activity for me to keep up with, and people were excited to see what an alternative website could offer them. I guess they didn't find it here.