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Bounty Killer
Bounty Killer 2013
I was actually first made aware of this movie through a company that offered to allow my site to host a giveaway for the movie. I thought it looked like a lot of fun, had a couple recognizable names in it, and it was based on a graphic novel, so I decided I would give it a shot and I was not disappointed. It’s got great action, a great visual feel to it, and even a bit of T&A. There’s even some interesting twists and turns along the way to keep things interesting. The acting’s not going to win any awards, but that’s not surprising for this type of movie, it has a great grindhouse feel to it, but it’s much more stylish and sleek with either a decent sized budget, or someone who knows the right way to stretch a small budget. It looks great, sounds great, and I had a great time watching it.
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Flights, Tights, and TV Nights: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1
TV Nights: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Episode 1 “Pilot”
airdate 9/24/13
airdate 9/24/13
I’ve been wanting to add TV shows to this site for a long time, but there are a couple big problems with that situation for me, one is that there were very few new TV shows that I could look at an episode at a time as they came out, I had wanted to do it with Arrow last year, but for whatever reason I just never got around to it. And if I wanted to go back to an older series I would want to do a full season at a time, and when I barely have enough time to watch movies, it’s an even taller order to take the time to watch a full season of a show, even if it could be broken up into smaller chunks. But I this year I was excited by a new series coming out this year, it’s based in the Marvel cinematic universe and it brings back everyone’s favorite Avenger, Agent Coulson. I’m talking about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And it started with a very impressive pilot. I just hope it lives up to its premier.
Special
Special 2006
It’s time once again for me to tackle this month’s obstruction for the 5 Obstructions Blogathon hosted by My Films Views. This month’s obstruction was deceptively simple: write a review that’s more than 1,250 words long, and if you want to go the extra mile write a review that’s over 2,000 words long. I try to average my reviews at about 1,000 words, I personally feel like if they’re much longer than that they are being too wordy and also fewer people want to read overly long reviews. I also thought about using this to go off on a bad movie, which is often easier to write about than a good movie. Instead I decided to take a closer look at a movie fewer people will have seen. I hope you enjoy and also be sure to check out some of the other entries in the blogathon.
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Judge Dredd
Judge Dredd 1995
I’ve been wanting to watch this movie for a while, ever since I watched the Judge Minty short even though I know it’s a far cry from the more serious tone of both the short and the recent Dredd movie with Karl Urban. What really made me want to watch it was watching Demolition Man which also starred Sylvester Stallone and had Rob Schneider in a small role, so I wanted to watch this movie with the small thought in mind that this is a future that takes place after Demolition Man, and in a lot of ways there are some similarities, but this is a very different movie than Demolition Man. I also went into this thinking that it was going to be a very bad schlockfest with Schneider hamming it up and Stallone giving a bad performance, and yet it’s not that nearly as much as I expected it to be. It’s actually a relatively good movie, but it has a poor script that doesn’t make good use of the characters, and it’s also notable for breaking one of the only things that I know about Judge Dredd the comic character: he never takes off his helmet, and yet Stallone takes his helmet off a mere 15 minutes into the movie and doesn’t put it back on again until the very end.
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Filmwhys #14 The Untouchables and Chronicle
Apologies for the late post for this episode of Filmwhys. I had an issue with my usual recording program not wanting to record for whatever reason, so I had to find a quick replacement, and that replacement ended up being a trial version that only recorded in 5 minute chunks and also recorded an echo off of my microphone, so the clean-up editing took a lot more time than usual, but I hope I managed to remove all the annoyances and cover up the breaks as neatly as possible. Anyway for the actual episode, I talked with Ryan McNeely from 5 Word Movie Reviews who asks me why I haven’t seen the Untouchables, a great film from Brian DePalma about Elliot Ness, Al Capone, and the Chicago way. And in return, I ask him why he hasn’t seen Chronicle, a unique take on both found footage and the superhero film from just last year.
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Almost Super: Demolition Man
Almost Super: Demolition Man 1993
I realized that it’s been quite a while since I’ve written one of these “Almost Super” reviews. And this past weekend I watched Demolition Man which had me thinking through most of the movie that it feels like it could easily be the prequel to Judge Dredd. It’s got Rob Schneider in it, and though it may be set in a utopian future rather than a dystopian future it has a similar feel to it. Well, a similar feel to the trailers that I’ve seen for Judge Dredd since I haven’t technically watched that one just yet. It also happened to be the Movie Of The Month over at the Lamb so I thought it would be a perfect movie to use my tag for movies that aren’t quite a superhero movie, but share a lot of the same qualities with them. Anyway, for the actual movie itself, Demolition Man was a fun little 90’s cheesy action movie with both Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes hamming it up with as many action one-liners as they can fit into their dialogue. It had a lot of really odd future ideas in it, but it was a fun ride while it lasted.
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Batman: Year One
Batman: Year One 2011
After first hearing about these DC animated movies several years ago through Kevin Smith of all places (based on the fact that he has a one-liner in Doomsday referencing his well-known work on the scrapped Superman Lives script), watching several of them before starting this site and loving every single one of them through varying degrees, I’ve finally watched every single one of them that has currently been released. I still have to re-watch Gotham Knights and Justice League: New Frontier so I can review them, but I have seen all of them until Justice League: War comes out next year. You can expect a top ten list in the near future. But for now I’m just talking about Batman: Year One, based on the Frank Miller run about both eventual Commissioner Jim Gordon and Batman’s first year in Gotham. It shows how deep the corruption runs in Gotham from the outset but while it is called Batman: Year One, I almost think it should have been called Gordon: Year One, and I’d be perfectly ok with that. It has some weak points, but it’s still a great addition to the library of animated DC titles.
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Super Inframan
Super Inframan 1975
Last month I decided to join in on a handful of blogathons and other projects. Some of them I got to in a reasonable amount of time, and this one was one of those that got pushed back a little bit too far. Over at Your Face, they have been doing a Shaw-gust blogathon during the month of August, reviewing films from the Shaw brothers, who are best known for their plethora of kung-fu flicks in the 70’s though they produced many movies outside of that range. These are the flicks known for their fight scenes and bad dubbing, almost any kung-fu parody from this era featured the badly out of synch lip movements and very rough translations, and that is how I watched my contribution for what ended up slipping into Shaw-tember, Super Inframan. And even though it predates them by many years, this movie totally feels like a handful of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episodes strung together. There’s a lot of guys in rubber monster costumes, a lot of kung-fu, and a whole lot of jumping around. It’s got plenty of fun moments, and just as many wtf moments.
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Filmwhys #13 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and All Superheroes Must Die
It’s that time again folks, another Filmwhys episode has been released to the general public. This week I have guest Jason Soto of the site Your Face who asks me the question why haven’t I seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original one from 1974, a low budget horror movie that first introduced us to Leatherface. And in return I ask him why he hasn’t seen All Superheroes Must Die, which is pretty close to a superhero horror movie. I was also able to ask a few brief questions with the creator of All Superheroes Must Die, Jason Trost at the end of the episode.
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Super Buddies
Super Buddies 2013
Since started this site, I’ve expanded my focus quite a bit. For the first half of the first year, I was limiting myself to only theatrically released superhero movies. I quickly included home video releases so I could review the great DC Animation titles and my list of movies to watch is always growing. And while I doubt I’ll ever expand it so much that I end up watching and reviewing Dora the Explorer: Superbabies, I did decide to watch and review this movie. It did help quite a bit that my daughter is already a fan of the Buddies series of movies and I realized that I haven’t really watched a lot of movies with her lately even though I would almost always mention Jena in the early days of this site. Now, this movie has a few things going against it right from the start. It’s a Disney, straight-to-home-video movie, it has talking puppies, and it’s somewhere around tenth in the long running series of Air Bud and later Buddies movies. I’m not going to go out and say that this is a good movie by any means, but when I look at it from the perspective of being aimed towards younger kids, you could do a lot worse than Super Buddies.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 