Blog Archives
Graphic Horror: Faust: Love of the Damned
Faust: Love of the Damned 2000
And with just a few days left before Halloween, I finished my goal of watching the last horror movie on my list of films based on comics. This was a bit of an odd one, I even tried watching it about a year ago but only made it about a half hour in before I got sidetracked with other things and just never got back to it until now. It’s a low budget horror movie that has elements of exploitation cinema with just a touch of a superhero plot mixed in. It’s incredibly bizarre with a guy who sells his soul to a demon, a lot of sex, a bit of torture, plenty of gore, and a demon summoning ritual slash orgy at the end. There’s even a bit of a love story mixed in, but it’s so bizarre and convoluted that it’s difficult to put into words.
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Graphic Horror: 13: Game of Death
13: Game of Death 2008
Halloween is getting near and I’m down to my last couple horror movies based on comics. And as I feel like I’ve done several times on this site, I’ve gone backwards in my viewing. I initially watched this story as told by the American remake 13 Sins before coming back around and watching the original Thai version that was made a few years earlier. I knew there were several changes between the two versions but the original still had quite a bit of the same impact with the combination of suspense, comedy, and the occasional moment of gore. And as is often the case when available, I watched this film with the English dub rather than the subtitled version.
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Zoom
Zoom 2016
This year has been an interesting one, I’ve discovered and watched more films in the past month or two than I ever anticipated coming out this year with a few more to come. This film is one of the few that found its way to me via the PR department which suggested that I watch the film via the site We Are Colony. This film is one of the few where I do stretch the definition of a “comic book movie” to include movies about comic books themselves. The comic book in question is written by Allison Pill’s character and also plays a large part of the movie via animation. I wasn’t exactly sure where this film was going, and there is one major component of the story that’s easily spoiled, and is in much of the advertising for the film but is actually better if you’re unaware of it for the first watch. There’s a lot of humor, a lot of sex and nudity without having a lot of actual nudity, and it has an interesting concept that can be surprising, but I will be spoiling in this review. One final note about We Are Colony’s site, it unfortunately wasn’t a great experience for actually watching the movie without a solid high speed internet connection, there’s very little buffering allowed and there’s no option to lower the video quality – or if there is, it’s not easily found. So trying to watch this movie with a spotty internet was more of a pain than it should have been.
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Superhero Podcast Review: KAPOWcast
It’s time once again for another superhero podcast review where I’m checking out the last podcast that has been recommended to me. My final verdict comes down to one of three recommendations: Subscribe, Selected Episodes, or Unsubscribe. I’m always looking for new ones to check out so if there’s one that you’re a part of, or one that you listen to and I haven’t reviewed here yet, leave a comment, send me an e-mail at Bubbawheat@msn.com, or hit me up on Twitter @Bubbawheat. This is also one of the first ones where I’m going off of the minimum number of episodes listened to before reviewing with 3 plus a 4th that I’m listening to as I write this review, so before I get into things I will say that I’m not quite sure I have a full feel for this podcast but I’ll do my best to share what it’s about.
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Suicide Squad
Suicide Squad 2016
Like with any recent DC live action movie release these days there’s a lot more to it than just “Did I like it?” or “Did I not like it?” It seems like it started a little bit with Manof Steel and escalated greatly with Batman vs Superman and once again there’s this great divide between a very low critical consensus and a record breaking box office. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Does it really even matter anymore as long as the money is flowing and nothing’s going to stop this DC train from moving along trying to catch up to the Marvel money train chugging a few billion dollars ahead. Obviously, I’m a superhero movie fan, you don’t sit through over 300 superhero movies without either being a fan, becoming a fan, or quitting about 100 movies ago. My expectations for Suicide Squad were very similar to the animated Assault on Arkham, and what I got wasn’t a far cry from it. The characters were fun, it was fast paced, sure there were some flaws with the story but at the end of the day, my wife and I had a great morning at the movies. It would just be nice if there was a little bit more cohesion so that everyone else had fun too.
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Top 10 (Non-DC) Animated Comic Book Movies
After finishing up a full month of animated movies, I managed to complete one of my mini-goals. I have finished watching every animated movie that’s currently on my list, as well as a couple that weren’t. So with that in mind, I thought it was time to share my top 10 list of animated comic book movies. There are a couple conditions here – one is that I decided to exclude DC Animated films just because their output is so massive that they literally make up half the total list of films that I’m choosing from, and also because I’ve already done a top 10 list of just DC Animated films so I’m not looking to repeat myself. I considered also excluding Marvel in fairness, but their animated output is still quite small, and much of it is quite lacking. I also decided to exclude superhero movies that weren’t based on a comic i.e. no Incredibles. Spoiler alert, it would be at the top of the list. But with those conditions out of the way, let’s get to the list! And FYI, you can click any of the titles to check out my original full reviews on the movies.
When the Wind Blows
When the Wind Blows 1986
This post is doing double duty for me as it technically kicked off yet another animation month as well as being a part of A Timely Blogathon that’s being run by Film Grimoire and MovieRob all about films that are 90 minutes or less even though it will have posted over on their site before I decided to share it here as well. And since I saved it for their blogathon it also just about wraps up my own animation month aside from one final movie I hope to cover tomorrow. This film is ten minutes shy of the 90 minute limit for the blogathon which isn’t surprising since most animated films run shorter than live action due to the amount of work involved in each minute of animation versus each minute of live action. The film itself follows an elderly couple in the English countryside who had lived through the second World War and are now faced with the fallout of the first attack kicking off a third.
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Turok: Son of Stone
Turok: Son of Stone 2008
It’s always interesting to me when I discover films that I previously hadn’t heard about across my nearly five years of running this site. I was vaguely aware of the Turok video game series from the late 90’s, but I never knew that it was based on a comic book. I also never knew that it was turned into an animated movie around the same time as the last installment of the game series in 2008. This film generally ignores most of the video game series and goes back to the roots of the comics to tell an origin story of sorts for Turok and his journey to the Land of the Lost more or less. It’s filled with plenty of blood and action, attempts at being culturally sensitive rather than playing into Native American stereotypes, but in the end it didn’t quite accomplish the most important thing that it should have done. It never really made Turok feel like a real character instead of an action hero stereotype.
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The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
It’s not even halfway through the month and I’m already at my final fully animated film aimed towards grown ups until the Killing Joke comes out later on this month. And unfortunately, like Lady Death, this one fell flat for me though for completely different reasons. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie as it had a very similar juvenile sensibility only this was much more liberal with the nudity and gore which makes sense as it was directed by Rob Zombie. Straight up comedies are occasionally difficult to review objectively because humor is such a subjective thing. But when it came to my sense of humor and this movie’s sense of humor, they only lined up about 3% of the time. The rest of the time I was either cringing at the jokes made at the protagonists expense, or marveling at how they managed to get Paul Giamatti and Rosario Dawson in these roles. There was plenty of horror homages and felt like it was trying to recapture some of the early Ralph Bakshi animation, but it just fell completely flat for me.
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Lady Death
Lady Death 2004
I feel like I’m already halfway through this month of animation and unfortunately I’ve hit the first snag. Things have been going pretty peachy so far and I just hope that this isn’t a portent of things to come. I also want to make a quick mention of Hulu where I watched this film. Recently it has been pushing its paid subscriptions so hard that you can barely even get past the front page without signing up for a free trial. They do still have a large number of movies available to watch without a subscription, but it’s not intuitive on how to get to anywhere to search for them. But if you aren’t scared off by this review and want to watch it for yourself, just click right here and go straight to it. But the film itself has a few moments of gorgeous artwork, but aside from that is just a jumbled mess with bad voice acting.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 