Category Archives: Movie Review

Hellbound and Down: A Hellraiser Fan Responds to the Hellraiser: Judgement Trailer

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Today it is my pleasure to present a special guest post from my buddy Brendan Carrion. He’s one of the blokes behind the excellent Full Metal RPG podcast and my go to guy when it comes to the world of roleplaying games. Brendan posted an abridged version of this rant about Hellraiser on his Facebook page and I thought it to be so eloquent and informed whilst still remaining visceral and pissed off that I begged him to let me to share it here. Brendan graciously agreed so please enjoy this dose of his scorn then go check out the mighty Full Metal RPG podcast.

The Road to Hell

So the other night I get home from work and my girlfriend is sitting on the couch and she’s really anxious to show me a trailer on YouTube for the new direct to DVD Hellraiser sequel called Hellraiser: Judgement. She plays it for me, sitting there, watching my face, and when it’s over she says,

“So. What do you think?”

I think she was expecting me to fall off the couch and start rolling around on the the floor, my mouth all afroth, as I cursed the heavens for inflicting on us another goddamn subpar Hellraiser sequel that no one was asking for. I think she was expecting me to start pacing around  the apartment, flailing my hands over my head and shrieking about continuity in a high-pitched voice.

I’m a nerd about this type of shit and this is what we do.

But neither of these things happened. It was just another trailer that shows us too much of another crummy movie. It wasn’t an assault on my personal past as a human being or a cultural hate crime against the beloved legacy of a finely crafted story woven over generations.

So despite the fact that I have: A.)  the movie poster to the first Hellraiser film hanging in my living room. B.) Beloved pictures of me mugging with Doug Bradley and Ashley Lawrence at Monsterpalooza in 2014. C.) The poster for Hellraiser: Bloodline tattooed to my flesh, my reaction to the trailer was pretty blase.

Over the next couple of pages I’ll attempt to explain why.  Continue reading →

80s and 90s Cartoons: The Bad Babysitter

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Ahhh, cartoons. The nostalgic comfort blanket, the technicolor dreamweaver, the idiot box babysitter. I wanted to say “I miss good cartoons”, but I don’t, because I watch them all the time. I watch Transformers, I watch Thundercats, I watch Doug, and sometimes I watch Recess, although I was already too old to watch that when it came out and don’t really know why I enjoy it so much, so that doesn’t need discussing here to be honest. What I’m saying is that, in 2017, as a grown up lady, I not only care very little about what people might think of me spending my Saturday mornings watching old cartoons, but that everything I ever want is right at my fingertips.

As youngbloods likely of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I imagine you’re more than happy to stand behind me as I turn my grizzled grey mug up to the sky, and shake my fist yelling about how “KIDS TODAY DON’T KNOW THEY’RE BORN”. At last count, there are about 300 cartoon channels available to today’s youth. Nickleodeon, 6 different incantations of Cartoon Network, Disney, endless dreck available immediately on Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV. You couldn’t get through it all if you paused the clock for 6 months and never slept. It’s insane. Naked bears, pokemons, yu-gi-ohs, CGI chipmunks, nu-school Manga looking My Little Pony. I could go on, but I won’t.

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Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat: Annihilation – The Old Switcheroo

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After the abominable trip down memory lane led by the Street Fighter review, and a lot of time spent recently cranking up old consoles and listening to the Streets of Rage soundtrack whilst running on a treadmill (as well as the Kid Chameleon soundtrack, which was hard to find and is shit, but also now haunts my dreams), I thought it might be time to tackle another Blockbuster special based on a video game.

Mortal Kombat, if you know me, seems like a very obvious choice, so in the interest of repressed memories and enjoying something I couldn’t recite back to you as a one woman show, I thought I’d have a look at some other options. You can guess how that worked out for us all, since you are sitting here reading a Mortal Kombat review…

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No Retreat, No Surrender Part 2

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Ok so the other week I filled you in on the back story to my first exposure of martial arts masterpiece No Retreat No Surrender. If you’ve just tipped up, get yourself informed here, then you can come back and get into the meat of it.

So after Jason gets beat up at Kelly’s birthday party he runs home and beats hell out of the stuff in his garage dojo. His dad can no longer teach Karate because JCVD snapped his leg so now he pulls pints down at some grotty local watering hole. I mean, it’s all starting to sound like one of them sad Bruce Springsteen songs isn’t it? Continue reading →

Bad Boys: And some Skittles

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Join me, if you will, in 1995. I’m 11. Our household is quite heavily into basketball, Fresh Prince (even though we don’t understand half the sexy jokes), and beating each other up. Still.

So what do you think happened when we found out that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence were gonna be in an action movie, with guns, bad guys, guns, swearing, fast cars, and guns? You guessed it. Meet me on the corner by the video shop, guys. Friday, 6pm, bring your Skeleton warriors glow in the dark pyjamas (so we can match, natch) and your special fried rice.

In a bizarre ritual of which I never understood the licensing loopholes, before you were able to purchase the videos for real, wrapped in cellophane, with a bunch of leaflets inside beckoning you to purchase a crappy tshirt (“IF YOU SEE THE POLICE – WARNER BROTHER!”) or some orthopaedic shoes, you were able to procur the VHS tapes as ex-rentals. Not much difference in quality, I’m not sure how many other people who lived in Abington, Northampton were renting the Ewoks cartoon, but they came in a different box. The massive, weird, heavy, and, as we discovered exercising some of our bottomless sibling-based rage, quite dangerous rental box. The questions surrounding this were endless. Where are the real boxes? Whose job is it to swap the covers out? What are they made of that doesn’t break when you throw them off the roof at your brother? None of this was ever answered, but it didn’t matter. I loved Bad Boys so much, that once again, to save herself money, my long suffering mother purchased this movie for us ex-rental, such was the cost of keeping us in bubblicious Friday nights. And once again, I watched it every Monday before school until the next big favourite came along/the tape was worn down to a macroscopically thin band, probably snapping in the machine.

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Stand on your own- No Retreat, No Surrender PART 1

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NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kurt McKinney, 1986

Whilst somewhat overshadowed by actual wars in which real people died, make no mistake eighties popular culture was a bloody battlefield of bitter conflict. Coke vs Pepsi, NES vs Sega, Roxanne Shante vs The Real Roxanne. All gruelling wars of attrition in their own right but they all pale in significance next to the harsh reality of my own personal Hamburger Hill….Betamax vs VHS…..

See my family didn’t have a lot of disposable cash. And whilst there was always a modest meal on the table, luxuries like video recorders were pretty far down the list of things we could afford. If I wanted to watch a movie I had to wait for it to come onto terrestrial television or hope that an invite from the kid next door  to watch a tape round there might be forthcoming. One day I will tell you all the story of how I feigned illness whilst at a classmates birthday party and weaved an intricate deception just so I could be left alone in the house to use their video player to watch Empire Strikes Back. I was eight years old.

In 1988 my dad returned home from work with a pep in his step. For a man who dug holes in the road for forty years of his life this was an unusual sight. Normally he’d drag himself through the door at the end of the day, defeated. Eat his dinner in silence then slump in the armchair and fall asleep watching the news. But today was different. He entered our home with a look of triumph upon his brow. ‘Look what I’ve got’. Out of a black bin bag he produced a bulky video recorder. My eyes flickered with delight as my Dad’s craggy features split and he smiled down at me and together, father and son hastened to the front room to set up the video recorder and commence our journey into cinematic heaven.

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Too Much Horror Business: Overdosing on the macabre at the age of 4

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Not one to blow my own trumpet, but I’ve seen pretty much 95% of all Horror films ever made.

Where did I get that percentage from? My arse. I’ve absolutely no idea how many I’ve seen, but it’s a fucking lot I can assure you.

Earlier in the year my Mum told me that my fucking dickhead Dad showed me The Hills Have Eyes on VHS when I was four years old. A ridiculous thing to do and I wish he hadn’t as, apparently, I was greatly affected by it and rightly so, it’s a fucking NASTY film. But, a year later, Ghostbusters shit me up just as bad so maybe I’m just a YELLOW CHICKEN. But it ignited a love for ghoulies and ghosties that never left. It was kept burning by Fighting Fantasy books, Scream comic, 2000AD, Splatterhouse arcade machines, Garbage Pail Kids, Monster in My Pocket, Supernaturals, Oink! And the ability to draw whatever my imagination desired. The mid-late 80s was a fucking incredible time to be a young Horror fan.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

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Author: Joe Boyd

This review starts on a cluttered bedroom floor in a small Derbyshire town, where two gangly teenage boys with too much hair are sat in front of an eviscerated VCR. It’s the mid-2000s, and me and my friend Mike are watching horror movies.

This always was a bit of a trip for me. Mike has a personality disorder, so spending time with him was never like hanging out with the average teenage boy. His moods are erratic, and his outlook on life switches from happy to nihilistic in an instant, flicking back just as quickly. He’s been diagnosed with ADHD before, and it’s easy to see why; his attention is constantly springing from one activity to the next. Watching horror movies is, therefore, an interesting experience.

Mike doesn’t have the patience for a whole movie, or even half of one. He watches them in bursts of energy, like a series of sprints, pausing to play a videogame or take something apart to see how it works, before catching up where he left off. When him and I get together, therefore, he skips most of the films. What I get is a kind of highlight reel of all the gory bits, as he switches out one tape for another in excited glee.

We watched vampires slash up a bar in From Dusk till Dawn, followed by Drew Barrymore’s fatal final phone call in Scream. We watched Final Destination – the perfect film for Mike’s attention span – in a chaotic, random order, skipping from death to death and laughing at the contextless slaughter.

In retrospect, that’s not actually much different from watching Final Destination normally.

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Kiss Me Fat Boy! – Stephen Kings IT

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Now I want to preface this article by admitting that It is an obvious choice for a horror movie retrospective but it has significant importance to me – it managed to scare me off a whole genre of film up until this very day, which means I’ve missed out classics such as Jason X and Nine Lives. I cannot stand watching most horror movies and I really do believe it links closely to the clown played by the guy from Home Alone 2.

It’s best for us to go back to where this haunting began – I believe the year was 1996, I was at a friends house for what I understood would be an enjoyable birthday sleepover. I remember we played some Tekken 2, I assume we ate some breaded chicken and watched the Demon Headmaster – all things that guarantee a 9 year old a great night of entertainment.

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The Eclipse – True Past Death

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“Then she knew. She knew that she was seeing a ghost, and she realized for perhaps the first time in her life, that she too would die. That her husband would die. And that her children would die. She knew in that moment, that she was looking at reality”

Is it a scarier prospect that ghosts are real, or just inventions of the mind? This is one of the fundamental questions wrestled with in the little watched Irish film “The Eclipse.” It is a film that focuses on loss, and how the people we love fill spaces in our world that don’t close easily when they’re gone. It is about holding onto whatever is left, even pain, in order to avoid forgetting, and how that can turn toxic and limiting. The film is a hybrid of a slow paced character study, relationship drama and horror. It borrows all sorts of tricks from the latter to ramp up tension and even provides a few jump scares and ghost sightings. Using voyeuristic camera angles, shots from inside darkened rooms and just behind railings or bushes, it gives the whole film a feeling of dread lurking just outside the frame. But this dread isn’t usually of the typical horror manner, it isn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or vengeful spirit manifesting itself to expel intruders. The dread is of a more human kind. When someone loses a wife, a mother, a child or anyone really, what do they hold onto ultimately to keep their life from spinning out of control?

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