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| Theodore Rex: doncha just love 'em? |
Race with the Devil, 1975 **½ (Warren Oates and Peter Fonda on the run from the hick satanists, not bad, but not memorable, except for the ending)
Gymkata, 1985 * or ***** (really stupid martial arts film that never slows down and is actually pretty good entertainment if you're drunk and with lots of friends around)
Beast in Space AKA La bestia nello spazio, 1980 * or ***** (absolutely inane and absurdly cheap space flick made with the same plot as Walerian Borowczyk's artsy horror film The Beast and the same lead actor, Finnish-born Sirpa Lane)
Wake in Fright, 1971 **** (Australian film thought being lost, but found in the early 2000's, very noirish stuff about a guy who gets stuck in the middle of nowhere with lots of Aussie drunks fooling around and shooting kangaroos just for the fun of it, Ted Kotcheff's strong direction)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, 2010 **½ (mildly funny I Walk the Line parody with some good music, but almost 30 minutes too long)
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| Die Wand: human and nature |
The Foetus, 1997 **½ (Finnish lost film from the nineties which I've managed to salvage on VHS, uneasy mix of extreme gore, extreme perversions and highly experimental editing and storytelling, irritating at best, but almost always interesting, luckily only 40 minutes long)
The Last Circus AKA Balada triste de trompeta, 2010 *** (inventive, wild and unpredictable, but not very interesting thematically, the first film by Alex de la Inglesia I've liked)
Copkiller AKA L'assassino dei poliziotti, 1983 ***½ (see my earlier review here)
Vampire's Kiss, 1988 * or ***** (awful but funny "Nicolas Cage goes ape-shit crazy" vampire film from the yuppie era)
Theodore Rex, 1995 * (so awful I wanted to eat my brains, luckily it was very late and I was very drunk)
El ángel exterminador, 1962 ***** (one of Buñuel's masterpieces, very eerie drama of upper-class jerks who are suddenly not able to leave the room of a house they're in)
The Mechanic, 1972 **½ (Bronson actioneer trying to be deep, better when there's only action on the screen)
More Overlooked Films here. (And here's the lowdown on the last year's Cabin Film Festival.)
Seen a few of these years ago -- RACE WITH THE DEVIL was on TV when I was a teen and I've remembered it ever since. Scared the crap out of me then. Satanists were a 1970s pop culture scapegoat when I was growing up. We were taught to fear them just as Communists were in the 1950s. My hometown newspaper tired toblame them for any unexplained vandalism or unpunished crime. Wish I could find a copy of RACE WIOTH THE DEVIL now. I don't think it's available on DVD unless it's bootleg.
ReplyDeleteVAMPIRE'S KISS still sticks in my mind as the beginning of Nicolas Cage's losing whatever it was that made him appealing to me. Infamous for his eating a live cockroach in one scene which is nothing compared to what goes on in reality TV shows these days.
The original THE MECHANIC with all its Zen-like pseudo-philosophy is still better, I think, than the lame and grotesquely brutal remake with Jason Statham. Sutherland was worth watching while nearly everyone else was utterly awful.
Of those I've not seen and you recommend I'm starting a search for Die Wand.
Theodore Rex? What possessed you?
Thanks for your comment, John!
ReplyDeleteWhat possessed me? The love of bad movies, I guess - and booze. But this was way past bad.
As for RACE WITH THE DEVIL: we indeed watched it from a new DVD. But maybe it's not out on DVD in the US.
Hope you can find DIE WAND, it's worth a try!