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brandoncruze
Reviews
Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988)
Arhur is on the rocks and Hobson is on stand by
Millionaire Arthur Bach, again brilliantly played by Dudley Moore, has been happily married to ex-shoplifter Linda (Liza Minnelli), for five years and he's still living the dream, perpetually drunk, pulling schoolboy pranks and still laughing at his own jokes without a care in the world.
That all changes when Arthur's vindictive and conniving former father-in-law Burt Johnson (Stephen Elliot) engineers a takeover coup of Bach Industries, forcing Arthur's father (Thomas Barbour) to cut Arthur off. Leaving him penniless, homeless and hopeless unless he divorces Linda and marries Susan (Burt's daughter).
Linda returns to waitressing and Arthur hits rock bottom. Sadly all this blasts a huge hole in their plans to adopt a baby setting up an emotional crisis as Linda soon accept she's no longer able to stay with Arthur as he can't live without the money and he's suffering because he is unwilling to let her go.
Even worse for Arthur, his father-figure vitriolic butler Hobson (John Gielgud) is long dead and his replacement, Fairchild (Paul Benedict) is sadly no match and of no help. On the cold streets of Christmas time New York, Arthur, drunk and at the lowest point of his life, sees a vision of Hobson who has arrived with words of wisdom. Whether a drunken hallucination or a spiritual return, Hobson sets Arthur back on the road to a happy ending.
This is funny and at times whimsical, and I've never understood the negative reviews. It's a gentler and less crude performance by Dudley Moore as Arthur and he is as fantastic as ever. He's helped out very nicely by Liza Minnelli, John Gielgud and Geraldine Fitzgerald (who returns, this time as a more sprightly version of Arthur's grandmother).
Watch it at Christmas. It's a feel-good movie. 7/10.
Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965)
Strange, very strange.
A bizarre American neo-noir crime drama starring Sal Mineo and Juliet Prowse featuring hints of masturbation, pornography, lesbians, stalking, and drugs. The film is now regarded as a minor cult classic.
The story concerns Nora (Prowse ), who works at a seedy club and she begins to receive perverted phone calls from a man who seems to be watching her. Dismissing them at first as a sick prank she soon realizes to her horror that they are actually something far more serious.
Sal Mineo plays plays Lawrence who works at the club as a busboy. Lawrence takes care of his mentally challenged sister, and their relationship seems very odd indeed. You have to see it to believe it. Sal spends most of this film in skin-tight jeans, shirts, and speedos all of which which shows off not just his muscled physique but also his manhood.
Mineo does deliver a riveting performance as the demented baby-faced stalker and the weird plot twists try to keep you engrossed to a point but the overall weirdness of the film is it's biggest downfall.
Gritty, exploitive, violent, kinky and at times, disturbing but worth a watch, if for nothing other than to marvel at Mineo's physique and crazed performance.
Amityville 3-D (1983)
Enter The Gateway To Hell
Enter The Gateway To Hell reads the blurb on the poster.
Reporter/debunker and all time professional sceptic Tony Roberts buys the infamous Amityville house and then proceeds to spend the rest of the film dismissing all the B-movie spooky events and 'Omen' style freak accidents until he is finally forced to admit that there is indeed a well of hell under the basement floor.
Also known as 'Amityville III: The Demon' on VHS/BLU-RAY so expect to see a demon who does indeed make an appearance but looks rather like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, bursting out from the well of hell in the hilarious climax breathing fire and making the house blow up!
A plummeting lift, seances, a spontaneous combustion set-piece and prophetic-of-doom photos are all here to try and keep us engaged, but all this fails at being scary or evevn remotely creepy. There's no mention of the Montellis from the previous (and far superior Amityville II: The Possession) but the DeFeo's are mentioned by a young Meg Ryan.
In keeping with the 3D craze of the early 1980's 'Amityville 3-D' throws wasps, furniture, stuntmen, a frisbee, a skeleton reaching out and even a hand holding out a lit lighter. Creepy!
This film has aged badly. The acting is not great, the effects are poor and the end result looks like a made for TV movie.
The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Bizarre! Kinky!! Camp!!! Sacrilegious!!!! It's Ken Russell!!!!!
Ken Russell's 1988 rigmarole, nominally based on the Bram Stoker novel, plays out like some kind of feverish, contorted nightmare that has very little rhyme or reason.
The function of much of the writing (Ken Russell to be blamed again) is to throw as much bizarre tasteless imagery at the viewer, as if Russell's aim was to test the audience's endurance to see if they could manage to sit through this schlock to the closing credits.
Sammi Davis and Peter Capaldi cower in terror, babbling about a car without its headlights on, there's the standard crucified Christ and raping Romans rounding out one particular nightmare. And then we have the sexy High Priestess Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohue) paralyses a gormless boy scout (Chris Pitt) with a bite to his willy after leading him on wearing leather stockings and suspenders over a game of snakes-and-ladders. Later she fits on a giant dildo for an assault upon the virgin Eve ( Catherine Oxenberg). There's no end to the Priestess' talents.
Archaeologist Angus Flint (Capaldi) uses bagpipes to lure a vampire cop (Paul Brooke) and then he produces a mongoose from his sporran, and later a grenade, to combat the ancient evil of the white worm.
Oh, and there is also a fresh faced Hugh Grant playing the Lord of the Manor, James d'Ampton.
This movie is trashy and corny with a high volume of camp but that does not necessarily mean it is is bad per se, just don't go into it expecting anything other than a bizarre, kinky, very black comedy and you might just come out of it reasonably entertained.
Crimes of Passion (1984)
Anthony Perkins Goes Psycho For Ken Russell
Ken Russell's dark, deranged and completely uninhibited satire on American sexual dreams and nightmares stars Kathleenn Turner (in rumoured to be one of her own personal favourite roles) as a career woman by day who doubles by night as the ultra-hooker China Blue and acts out every male fantasy in the book, including picking up a cop, using him as a piece of meat beneath her, and gets totally carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick. Ouch, painful!
She meets her match in Anthony Perkins (in a performance that has to be seen to be believed), a deranged fundamentalist street preacher who is consumed by his own warped lust and who is slowly losing the control to act out his own dark fantasies.
In between, the film explores an 'average' suburban couple, John Laughlin and his wife Annie Potts, the latter has lost interest in sex, and her marriage. Laughlin through some moonlighting surveillance work crosses paths with China Blue, and also with Perkins' preacher.
The film has a lurid stylistic bravura and inbetween the lapses throws all but the kitchen sink at the audience, but ultimately this is in the main a very black and erotic comedy that after almost 40 years still has the power to shock.
Psycho II (1983)
"Remember, Norman. I'm the one who loves you. Only your Mother truly loves you."
Norman Bates, after 22 years of incarceration, is judged sane and released from the mental hospital and returns to his dilapidated motel overlooked by his old gothic house on the hill.
It's not long before Norman takes in a beautiful young house guest (Meg Tilly), and that prompts jealous "Mother" to rear her murderous head again.
But isn't mother dead? So who is that person in the window and who is committing the murders? Is it Norman? Or Marion Crane's revenge-mad sister (Vera Miles)? Or could it be the court-appointed sleazy motel manager (Dennis Franz) who Norman fired almost immediately upon being released?
Psycho II does a fantastic job of recreating the exhilarating blend of horror and black humour of the Hitchcock classic original, while adding a fair quota1980s stalk and slash.
Director Richard Franklin does an exceptional job of paying homage to the Alfred Hitchcock's style and updates that style to blend in nicely with the 1980s without the film ever becoming an out and out gorefest. Its creepy, it's fun and it is a rare sequel that easily holds it own.
Psycho III (1986)
Better than Psycho II !!!
"Norman Bates is back to normal. But Mother's off her rocker again!" Said one tagline. "The most shocking of them all." Said another.
It's now business as usual at the Bates Motel as a runaway nun Maureen Coyle (bearing the same initials as Marion Crane) arrives at the Bates Motel and triggers Norman first into a mental replay of the shower murder from the 1960 original and then to a tender case of love at first sight (or should that be love at first fright).
It is nice to see a revival Norman's taxidermy hobby, he's still stuffing birds and also Mrs Spool (not his mother, but his equally unhinged aunt, it now transpires). She is now stuffed, mummified and directing operations from her bedroom in the Bates family home just as Norman's real Mother used to do. Of course "mother" is determined to ensure that the course of true love is anything but smooth for Norman and his new gal Maureen Coyle.
Nice to see the slashings updated to what was expected to be seen in the 1980s (following on from Psycho II's trend) to compete with the likes of the Freddy and Jason franchises.
As Norman, Anthony Perkins gives another superb exhibition of hysteria, paranoia and total madness. This is the craziest we ever get to see Norman and he always seems to have a macabre wink throughout the proceedings.
There a plenty of nods to Hitchcock's original in both visuals and dialogue and the film kicks off with the suicidal nun and a recreation of the belltower scene from Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Psycho III is a pastiche, gothic thrill ride that surpasses Psycho II and that is all thanks to director/star Anthony Perkins, screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue, Cinematographer Bruce Surtees and composer Carter Burwell.
Psycho III 10/10.
Time Walker (1982)
Not as bad as some reviews claim
A mummy in a sarcophagus coffin is transferresd from Egypt back to a Californian university and when an unscrupulous student discovers five crystals within the coffin and steals them for his own gain he awakens the mummy, after a 3,000 year sleep, with deadly consequences.
Time Walker is not big budget, its not a gorefest and it certainly does not fit the usual 80s sci-fi horror movie of the day, which I think is primarily the reason for the negative reviews. Ok I agree some of the acting is not top drawer and the effects look rather dated (they probably weren't all that spectacular back in '82 either) but there is a sense of tension, especially during the scene with Susie trapped by the mummy in the elevator. It is certainly not a bad movie its just not a great movie either. But I enjoyed it.
For genre fans, there are a few familiar faces in the cast including Nina Axelrod (Motel Hell), Kevin Brophy (Hell Night), James Karen (Poltergeist), Antoinette Bower (Prom Night) and it was also great to see Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston (who starred alongside each other in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13) share screen time together again here.
I give this 6/10.
Destroyer (1988)
Good fun!
This horror movie is very similar to others of the time such as Prison (1987), The Chair (1988) and The Horror Show (1989) but this is much more fun.
A movie titled "Death House Dollies" begins filming in what the crew believes to be a deserted prison unaware that a former inmate, Ivan Moser- who raped and murdered 23 men and women, had survied the electic chair years earlier and is still in the prison and he is very angry!
There's plenty of humour, decent kills and gore and there is an entertaining scene from the film within the film showing a group of girls fighting naked in a shower.
Stand out performances go to Lyle Alzado as the demented Ivan Moser and legendary actor Anthony Perkins as the direstor of the tashy "Death House Dollies".
Bates Motel (1987)
Bud Cort has 12 cabins and 12 vacancies
This 1987 TV-movie is a curio piece which was intended as a pilot for a TV series that was never picked up and stars the ever likeable Bud Cort as an unfortunate young man who is bequeathed the Bates Motel after his friend and fellow patient Norman Bates dies. Bud, now declared sane and released from the hospital makes his way to the dilapidated Bates Motel with the intention of restoring and reopening. There are a few problems he needs to contend with first. Ghosts, dead bodies, skeletons, chairs rocking by themselves and also Lori Petty! This is not a classic by any means but it is a passable time-filler. The cast all do a fantastic job especially Bud and Lori and they are backed up very nicely by Gregg Henry, Moses Gunn, Jason Bateman and Kerrie Keane. Also as an added bonus we get Robert Picardo as well I will leave with Bud's leaving remarks from the film- "Nobody ever said life was easy. Then nothing ever worth it ever is. But you know, I think with a little luck, we're gonna do okay here. I think Norman would have liked that. Oh, by the way, if you ever need a room, come on by. Can't say for sure what you'll find, but that is what makes the world go round."
Lucky Stiff (1988)
Lucky Stiff Indeed!
Anthony Perkins' second and final film as director is this great black comedy about an over-weight loser in love played by the very funny Joe Alaskey who is, to his surprise, swooped off his feet (figuratively speaking of course) by the real-life Mrs Dan Aykroyd- Donna Dixon and invited back to her familys ranch for Christmas dinner. To his horror, Joe soon finds out that the family are cannibals and that he is to be their Christmas dinner! "I'm not the guest, I'm the buffet!" This is a funny film with some great wacky characters most notably Jeff Kober as the demented Ike and twins Philip Arthur Ross and Steven Robert Ross (the latter thinks he has commited suicide and is now a poltergeist). Lucky Stiff would be ideal viewing on Christmas day with some mulled wine after good turkey dinner.
Freak (1999)
Ignore the negativity.... This is pretty damn good.
Firstly, this is a low-budget affair, clearly influenced and inspired by Halloween 1978. Having said that, this is probably the best Halloween homage I've seen. I love Halloween 1978, its one of my favourites & Freak is just as creepy and tense in my opinion. The acting by unknown leads Travis Patton (who is also very HOT) and Amy Paliganoff are very both good and the killer looks very creepy and reminiscent of Michael Myers from the garage scene in Halloween 4. The murder scene at the beginning is very graphic & jarring. Overall I enjoyed this small horror gem & I recommend it to horror fans.