984: Prisoner of the Future (1982)

Businessman Tom Weston is brought to a warehouse by a political organization known as The Movement. Led by Dr. Fontayne, who spouts rhetoric from TVs conveniently placed on the street, his followers wear matching outfits and hang out near the TVs. So they're pretty easy to spot.  

Weston and some other businessmen are brought to a warehouse and told they are being held for their crimes and their sentences has already been decided.  The Warden urges Weston to confess, but he insists he's innocent of all charges. 

The only solution to his lack of cooperation is to strip the prisoners of their identity by assigning each a number, which is how they shall be referred to from now on.  Plus they will be subject to psychological  torture until they confess. Weston is locked in a cell and his only human contact is the Warden and a  minion who keep asking him to sign a statement confessing his crimes.

This is only a little over an hour long, and not the most interesting film.  It appears this was a pilot for a Canadian TV show.  There are rollerskating robots, a bust right out of Lionel Ritchies "Hello" video, and Weston's hair looks a bit powdery in the prison scenes, which sometimes gets confusing because it takes awhile for them to reveal that it's been ten years since he was imprisoned.

Font... of the future

Why Tom's wife is making a bust of Lionel Ritchie?

Matching outfits and a tv on the street? It must be the future.

Rollerskating robots.... of the future!

Computers... of the future

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

Brothers Eli and Josh are placed with a loving couple in Chicago.  Apart from culture shock and massive trauma from the Gatlin corn killings, it seems like a different environment would be a good idea. There they no longer have to worry about He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Instead they just need to watch out for the 1990s urban youths who only care about their hip hop and their drugs.  What a trade off.

While Josh tries to fit in and make friends, young Eli doesn't cotton to the city and it's non-corn ways. So he plants some kernels in an abandoned building next door, the magic corn begins to grow, Eli kills a drifter and starts building a child army of urban kids.

So, does anyone screen the children from Gatlin before they put them in a new home?  The kids killed their parents and worshipped a demon in a corn field. Surely that is not a prime candidate for a happy household, especially when placed with white bread urban people who seem incapable of handling difficult children. Perhaps the children should get some major therapy before ever being unleashed on the world outside their corn death town.

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996)

After her agoraphobic mother starts having nightmares, Grace returns home to take care of her little brother and sister.  She's been studying for a career in medicine, and gets a job with the local small town doctor.

Shortly after arriving in town, the clinic is full of children who have a fever, and Grace's Mom has dreams of a melty faced boy. All the children claim to have different names, which turn out to be the names of long dead kids.  Hmm, I don't think things are going to go well, especially since this is children of the corn country.

This might have been better off by not calling itself a sequel to Children of the Corn. I'm sure it continues to profit financially from the title, but it seems like brainwashed children killing adults in town would be pretty spooky even without a cornfield to gather in. That being said, I wasn't particularly spooked by anything in the movie.  Little brother James is played by the guy who grew up to play Puck on the TV show, Glee.

Sharknado (2013)

Oh boy, here we go!  Fin, a former pro surfer, owns a bar on the pier and still likes to hang ten on the waves.  He's having a fine day at the bar after a great surf run, when the weather turns bad and waves start breaking over the pier. Everybody out!  Too bad the movie didn't have someone checking the continuity since the scenes with waves enveloping the bar don't match the calm quiet beach scenes shots from over head where it looks like a fine day to visit the non-flooded beach.

Fin decides he needs to rescue his daughter who is at his ex-wifes house. He gets there just in time, and they loose the extra characters so everyone can fit in the jeep. So now we've got the people from the bar, plus the ex-wife and daughter all stuffed in a car and going to rescue the son, who is an adult and at work.

What more do you need? Well how about a discussion about how Fin was never there for his son at a most inopportune time  while sharks are flying through the air? Or Fin refusing to pass by a school bus just in case there are children trapped inside? Or characters getting out of the jeep for no good reason and conveniently disappearing in a rush of water, thus opening up more space in the jeep? Or Fin cutting his way out of a shark with a chainsaw?

There are loads of continuity errors, bad cgi, Robbie Rist (Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch) as a school bus driver, and music from the band Quint (whose songs were produced and/or written by Rist).  The movie is fun, ridiculous and full of laughs. Let's hope the next one is just as silly.

Zombie Nation (2004)

A cop with a strange accent has a habit of pulling over women who haven't done anything, handcuffing them, driving them to a furniture warehouse, taking them inside, and forcing them to buy crap cut rate furniture. Well I lied about the last part - instead the women are never seen again.  Surprisingly his partner sits in the car the whole time and barely questions the human sized duffel bag our bad cop throws into the trunk.

When the partner mentions this odd happening to his wife and another new recruit, they are concerned.  When the new recruit reports it to his supervisor, the storyline with the new partner and his pregnant wife ends and we never see them again.

The new recruit is given the bad cop as his new partner and the weirdness continues.  The bad cop picks up a woman for jaywalking. But what he didn't realize is that she had just left a voodoo ceremony and for some unknown reason the voodoo ladies bring this lady back to life, along with all of his other victims. Yes, all five of his victims. It's a true zombie nation.

The problem is you'd never know they were zombies since they look like raccoons or someone going to a Souixsie Sioux concert in the early 1980s. The only way we know they're zombies is that they tell us so. Yes, that's right, they tell us.  Not only do they have no zombie attributes, they have perfect speech patterns.

So if you're expected a zombie nation, which implies an entire nation of zombies, well, you're going to be disappointed because the nation consists of five women with raccoon eyes.  And they are not typical zombies. They drive cars, talk, want to dance, have clean clothes, and are able to find employment.  Also they're not so bright, which is revealed when they see the killer and duck to hide, but hide on the side of the car he can see.

This is horrible, sometimes funny, disgusting, repulsive, ridiculous, but always terrible. The acting, dialogue and sets are all unacceptable.  The police station is a huge room with partitions and pipes on the walls, and the paint only goes so high. Is this a basement or boiler room? And voodoo priestesses who advise the zombies that instead of eating people they should be eating cheeseburgers? Yeah, that's a great idea.

Bad set - note the door was cut crooked

Bad makeup - two of the zombies

Bad set - The police station - note the white paint
on the left that just stops, the cheap partition, the
massive pipes, and the plush couch on the right. 

Shriek of the Mutilated (1974)

It's a really bad sign when a totally reasonable reaction to the  scene before the credits is, "Whaaaat?" Things get barely  coherent after the credits, but that's kind of what makes this movie interesting.

Dr. Prell and his students - all four of them - are going on an expedition to try to prove the existence of Bigfoot.  Oddly enough none of them seem too concerned that the last group of  students who went on this trip with Prell were slaughtered, except for the lone survivor who is now insane.

Prell takes his favorite student Keith out to a dinner, creepily orders a special item not on the menu, and has an uncomfortable rape-y vibe to everything he says.

The other students head to a hip party across town, which takes an awkward turn when Spence, the crazy survivor from Prells last trip hears that he is taking more students to the woods. "No more field trips!" he crazily yells as everyone stares at him and wonders why his girlfriend is wearing a crocheted hat, as well as why she brought him to such a fab party since he's a total downer.

Not scared away by Mr. Crazy, the next day the group gets a warning from an old man while driving in a decalled van (it's right out of Scooby Doo). Then meet up with Carl, another creepy professor, who lives in the house, and is an old friend of Dr. Prell. Carl has a mute Native American butler/servant/wierdo who is often lacking a shirt, and that's not a good thing.  Soon the expedition is in full swing and as you might expect, things go horribly wrong.

This is one crazy flick.  You've got a Yeti running out of a building to jump on someone, a girl who sleeps in her oversized glasses, two creepy professors, a song in the credits titled Love Shriek, and a Yeti in the woods who can only be described as frolicking, which is not frightening at all. There's a twist ending, lots of bad decor, bad haircuts, and a dying woman drags herself to the tub to laboriously  push a toaster into it, thus killing her crazy attacker who is taking a semi-clothed bath while drinking a beer.

Ridiculous dialogue:

"He does carry on about that episode. I suppose it was dreadful." (a partygoer referring to Spence, the only survivor of an animal attack which killed all the other students on the college field trip)

"It's too high pitched for a grizzly bear. It's too raccous for a moose." (.....so it must be Bigfoot?)

"I need solid proof that the Yeti exists. My entire reputation is at stake in this...." - Prell, (who would much rather chance being arrested for the disappearance of yet another class of students than not get his Yeti proof. And what kind of a reputation is he worried about since he's known as the Yeti guy?)

At least they used a cool font

Okay, good to know that we're looking for
something that could easily rip our limbs off.

Our crack team of Bigfoot/Yeti researchers

Bonk! Low hanging light and long corridor alert.

His craziness is overshadowing my macrame hat.

And he died with a mouthful of bubbles, blech! 

Is that Fred in the Mystery Machine chatting up
Old man Carruthers?

They can't bear to look at his awkwardly tight pants.

There is no explanation

Mute friendly Indian hippie servant?

Nope, this guy is definitely a problem.

Nice purple hair, professor

According to this map drawn by my five years old,
we're right about here. 

Yeti attack!

Pretty in Pink... channeling Molly Ringwald
before there was such a thing.

Cover his hand with make up... fur... anything.

Fugitive Mind (1999)

Fugitive Mind stars Michael Dudikoff as Robert, a man who does maintenance work for Gencom, has a great wife, lovely home, and nightmares that start to make him question his reality. Oh no! What's that?  Gencom is experimenting with brain control to erase his  memories, implant false memories, and control him so that he'll assassinate anyone who gets in their way?  Yup, that about sums it up, or in the words of my friend Tristan, this is The Shitty Manchurian Candidate.

Shapeshifter (2005)

A dishonorably discharged female soldier is hired as a prison guard at an old prison.  This turns out to be the place where they assign the guards that aren't very good.  The guards stand amidst the prisoners discussing the convicts mental disorders. So much for discretion, but the prisoners don't seem to mind as they're all sitting on huge leather couches, waiting to be transferred to the new portion of hte jail.

When a new prisoner with no ID is admitted, he has an unidentifiable accent and a strange tattoo on his chest. After watching the prisoner on closed circuit television as he chews into his forearm and pulls out a pendent, the new guard suggests that maybe they should check on him since he's now performing a ritual of some sort.

Well they should have done that sooner because as they're carrying the trance like prisoner out of the cell, he transforms into a monster with a meaty head and a body that looks like a ratty old gorilla suit. Honestly, it looks like something right out of the 1950s film, Robot Monster.

After kicking the female guard and chowing down on the other one, we cut back to the female guard with the prisoners and she's wearing a wife beater. Wait... where did her prison guard uniform go? Did the monster kick it right off her?  There's no explanation offered.

With a monster on the loose, their brilliant plan of escape is to lock themselves in one cell and then rip open the ceiling to crawl into which leads to a convenient human sized opening into an old office. Seriously?  From here on it is all monster vs. everyone else.  Overall it's pretty stupid.

Apocalypse of the Dead (2009)

aka Zone of the Dead

Uh oh, a quote before the credits. That's one of the three signs of a shitty movie.

Mina, an Interpol agent on her first big assignment, is responsible for transporting a prisoner. She's  teamed up with Mortimer and his pal who are the best in their field. This mission will be their last... oh god, okay so that's how this is going to go.

It's not clear how Mina got this assignment as she's nervous and far too inept to be in charge of this mission. And unfortunately for her, they're driving right through a town where some drunken Serb soldiers accidentally fired a shot which pierced a train carrying biohazardous gas that has caused people to become zombies.

The plot is propelled by conveniently bad decisions. Such as when they get into town and find the first van in their convoy seemingly abandoned at the side of the road. Instead of driving up, they park very far away and walk over to it to see what's wrong.

Then when they figure out people in town are going to attack them, they don't run to a vehicle. They continue to stand there and eventually decide to run through the nearby park to a building on the other side. Argh! I know the tire is flat on your car, but who cares? They're zombies! Get the hell out of there. Or get in the freakin' van since it appears to be perfectly fine.

This is badly dubbed. Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead) stars, but other than that there's nothing much to sell this one unless you're willing watch any zombie movie, which I pretty much am.  Also the guy depicted on the cover is more of a side note than a major character so you won't see him much.

Deadrise (2011)

Paula, who works for a historic preservation trust, has dinner alone at a nice restaurant to celebrate her recent success.  She orders the spicy fish, and the waiter reports the chef went overboard with the seasoning, which you'd think would be a plot point, but amounts to nothing.  Then she goes back to her hotel room, watches a news report about eels which are killing fish in the local waterways, and goes to sleep while pondering if it was a good idea to have the spicy fish for dinner.

The next day as she heads home, she's asked to check out a large ship whose owner just applied for a grant for historic preservation.  She drives fifteen miles down an overgrown dirt road to get to the site, finds the ship, and parks with her front tire almost off the edge of the land and directly under a piano hanging from a crane. Seriously?  

Needless to say, if you park under a piano, it's bound to fall.  The incessant honking horn of the crushed car summons Vigs, the caretaker of the ship, who puts the horn out of it's misery with a crowbar.  Since Paula's office has closed for the weekend, she's unable to get help and promptly drops her cell phone into the ocean. 

With no other option, she takes Vigs up on his offer to spend the night on board.  As time goes on, Paula hears noises, Vigs gets stranger, and the dinner he cooks makes Paula ill.  Later Paula asks about taking a shower. Because if there's one thing women crave, it's to be completely unclothed and vulnerable in a shower on an abandoned ship with a crazy caretaker acting all creepy.

The rest of the movie consists of Paula sleeping, waking up, wandering around the ship, interacting with Vigs... and waking up to find it's all a dream.  Then she goes back to sleep, only to find herself walking up, wandering around the ship, etc. It's a cycle that repeats endlessly.  So basically we're watching little vignettes which make no sense and don't relate to the things that just happened because  they never really happened in the first place because it was all a dream, you stupid son of a bitch.

You're left wondering if anything was real. Did Paula get killed by the falling piano? Did she die at the hotel because the fish she ate was tainted by whatever toxins the news stated were being dumped in the ocean?  Is she having a fever dream brought on by food poisoning from the overly spicy fish? What the heck is going on?  The best thing about this movie was the location, as it was filmed on a real ship which is pretty fantastic.  Other than that, this is not recommended.

 

In the far shots, it's a regular newspaper, but close up,
a single page from an inkjet printer 

I'm having trouble buying that a nice restaurant...

....would leave open a door so diners could view a repairman.
And why is this throw away shot even in the film?

Where should I park? So many choices....

I'll park in the bushes at the edge of the water right under
this piano. Perfect! Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Filmed on a real ship, the location is fantastic

The Raiders of Atlantis (1983)

aka Atlantis Inferno; Atlantis Interceptors; 

Hey-o! So far I'm digging the 50 Movie Sci-Fi Invasion box set I picked up for a mere $10.  First Hands of Steel, now this one?  Even if everything else is unwatchable, it's been worth the price.   Here's another crazy Italian action movie with a motorcycle gang right out of Mad Max, except they're from Atlantis. What? Yup, this is one strange film which consists mostly of gun fire and car / motorcycle / bus chases.

Mercenaries Mike and Washington (aka Mohammad) kidnap an old guy and turn him over to the Colonel, who is never seen or referred to again.  After that harrowing experience, Mike and Washington are ready for a vacation and head out on their boat.

Meanwhile over at a platform in the middle of the ocean, a scientific research team lead by nuclear physicist Professor Saunders is trying to raise a Russian submarine from the bottom of the ocean and has discovered an ancient tablet... which leads them to kidnap Dr. Rollins, a PhD in Pre-Colombian dialects who is being asked to decipher the hieroglyphics on the tablet.  I'm not sure a dialect expert is the best choice to review hieroglyphics.

Meanwhile as the submarine rises, there is a storm a-brewing in the ocean and a couple we've never seen before are pondering whether to go back in the house. The answer is obviously yes once the woman is shot in the neck with a dart. Huh?  Nobody expects a Mad Max motorcycle gang of the descendants of Atlantis in Miami, but all of a sudden here they are and they're ready to destroy everything in sight.

The final note in these messy seemingly unrelated segments is a huge island under a dome rising from the ocean.  Based on the title, this must be the island of Atlantis.

With the disastrous weather wrecking the platform and hitting the boat, everyone who survives ends up on the island, which has been destroyed by the bikers. This is very confusing.  So has Atlantis, which has been under water in a dome, somehow become modernized at a rate similar to the non-underwater world in Florida?  Were the Interceptors aka the bikers living on Atlantis, or in Miami? If they weren't in Atlantis, how did they get over there? If there were on Atlantis, then how did they get the motorcycles? And why did they kill everyone on the island and burn the buildings? Aren't those their people?  What the hell is going on here?

It's best just not to question it and go with the flow. Mike and the group on the boat must try to fight their way through the Interceptors who are looking for Dr. Rollins as she's key to their return. You'll forget they're on the island until the dome starts closing.  It's a smash bang movie and worth a watch if you're into ridiculous 1980s Italian action movies.

Don't miss the song, Black Inferno.

Ridiculous dialogue:

Dr. Saunders- Welcome aboard, Dr. Rollins.

Dr. Rollins- Aboard what?

Mike- What is that thing?

Dr. Rollins- I don't think you'd understand.

Mike- Oh, all sailors are guys like Popeye, huh? All we do is eat spinach.

Dr. Rollins- I like spinach, too.

Dr. Rollins- It's terrible, Mike. It's like living something unreal.

Mike- Unfortunately, it's all true.

Mohammad - Can't move. We're immobilized. (stated to explain why the characters can't extricate themselves from the situation)

The Love Boat has nothing to do with the rest of the film

All the best mercenaries wear button up
collared shirts, ties and a lightweight jacket.

The incredibly ancient artifact from the bottom of the sea

The Russian sub (not a toy) being raised
from the bottom of the ocean.

Argh! Something has happened and our fake
control panels are useless!

The creepy skull mask is overshadowed by his
apparent neck injury - awkward.

The incredible domed city of Atlantis

No need to worry about the fire right next to the car

Mad Max style cars and motorcycles... from Atlantis

Introducing the young good looking guy to the cast

Leather pants up to your nipples? Nothing gay about that.

Damn the people of Atlantis aren't the best artists

Reusing old sets from outer space movies