B-movie
laelaps | November 3, 2007
During the 1990's I can scarcely remember a time when one television station or another wasn't playing at least one of the four JAWS movies, TBS, TNT, or WPIX often devoting an entire day to films about killer oceanic creatures. Still, of the four films JAWS 3 (or 3-D, if you like) was one of the b-movies that was always making the rounds, and it's gratuitous special effects make it an easy target for this week's cheesy movie selection.
Although I didn't realize it as a kid, JAWS 3 picks up the story of the Brody family at a Sea World theme park (Sea World Orlando, a landlocked theme park,…
laelaps | October 27, 2007
Until I saw this 1972 film I had no idea that amphibians wanted to rule the world, but apparently they are cold-blooded masterminds bent on destroying Homo sapiens, or at least wrecking a crotchety old man's birthday. Oddly enough, however, Frogs doesn't even live up to it's own name, there being only one frog in the entire film (most of the "frogs" are really toads), but such considerations didn't stop the filmmakers from buying everything that slinked, slithered, or crawled from the local pet shops and creating a classic, putrid piece of movie cheese.
The eco-thriller is a bit of a sub-…
laelaps | October 20, 2007
I knew this movie was going to be painful, but Supercroc makes last week's film (Raptor Island) look like classic American cinema by comparison. I'm actually surprised that the film was not called "The Thing That Ate Los Angeles," although the film's super-sized antagonist seemed to accidentally step on/fall on its victims rather than consume them. At least it was short; mercifully, anticlimactically so.
Playing with relative sizes of organisms to make human beings helpless is a classic technique in science fiction and horror films, most notably seen in pictures like 1957's The Incredible…
laelaps | October 19, 2007
If it wasn't apparent already, I'm a sucker for monster movies, especially ones involving oversized crocodilians. The vast majority of them are absolutely horrible (like tomorrow's movie of the week, Supercroc), but next month (Nov. 8) a more promising feature from the director of Wolf Creek will be coming out. The film is called Rogue, and while it follows the basic killer croc formula (come on, how many original story lines about giant man-eating suchians can you come up with?) it seems like it's actually going to be scary and enjoyable, unlike the cheese-fest that was Primeval.
In fact…
laelaps | October 13, 2007What do you get when you put dinosaurs, terrorists, and Navy SEALs all in one place? The answer in "A mess," and in this case such a disaster carries the title Raptor Island. Starring Lorenzo Lamas, the film continues the long standing tradition of putting guns and monsters in the same place in the hopes that something good will come out on film. Indeed, it seems that more effort is required to serve up a plate of Hamburger Helper than was put into the story and dialog of this slice of movie cheese, and its painfully apparent from the very first scene.
We meet our hero, "Hack" (Lamas) and his…
laelaps | October 12, 2007Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment, but I having something of an affinity for cheesy B-movies. I probably acquired the taste during childhood, when Jaws II, III, IV, and most of the Godzilla series would be playing on any given weekend, and even though I would be hard pressed to give any of the movies more than 2 stars out of 5 I do like turning down the lights, grabbing some popcorn, and sitting down to watch something that I know is going to be nearly painfully bad. There are a few exceptions, a few creature features that stand out from the rest (i.e. Alligator, The Host), but by and…