Darkon (2008) 8/10

Swords! Shields! Nerds! Enter the land of Darkon.
Darkon is a documentary about a group of people who get together on weekends and dress up like medieval warriors, elves, kings, assassins, druids, and sorcerers. As you might imagine the people involved with this extra curricular activity are a bit eccentric and socially inept. These are the guys that sit around playing D & D in college instead of going out and partying. These are the guys that are your IT specialist at work. These are also your bosses, neighbors, and teachers.

The documentary chronicles the struggle between the different imaginary nations created by the people who play this real life game. We see the epic "battles" and crushing "defeats." We also see how this alternative lifestyle has affected their personal and business lives. For some it has allowed them to come out of their shell and grow. For others it keeps them from really succeeding in life. These people spend quite a lot of time and money creating their own home made suits of armor, swords (covered in protective foam of course), Shields, and battle standards.

Ultimately we find a huge group of people left out of more conventional social activities, creating their own world where they rule and finally have some social standing and power, something they lack in their day to day lives. Personally I find it refreshing that a group of people have found a common interest that brings them out of their homes, into parks, and are brought together in real life. In this day and age of computer addiction, home theatres, text messaging, email, and online dating, we find ourselves more and more isolated from those that we love and those that we want to meet. Here's a group of people actually communicating and interacting in real life. What a novel concept.

It would have been easy to show all of these people as the marginalized social freaks that many of them probably are. Instead the filmmakers have decided to show them in a positive but realistic light. We see the good and the bad, but the good out weighs the bad. I feel that directors used a very fair and even hand with this documentary and i applaud them for that.

If you're looking for a beautifully shot, even handed documentary about a world less seen by outsiders, check out Darkon. The film is engaging and entertaining, the perfect example of how good documentaries should be made.

Overall - 8/10

El Topo (1970) 7/10

El Topo has been given credit as the first in the long line of "Midnight Movies," populated by films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead, and Pink Flamingos. The film has also been locked away for almost 30 years due to legal disputes, and has only now finally been re-released. Alejandoro Jodorowsky certainly made El Topo a unique and thought provoking film, as well as a real head scratcher.

El Topo chronicles a man named El Topo (the mole) who is an expert gun fighter and saviour. He is led astray by a woman who pushed him to go to the desert to fight the greatest gun fighters in the world and kill them, to become the greatest of them all. With each fight El Topo learns more about himself until finally in the end he decides to give up his gun and serve to free a clan of underground dwellers trapped by the townspeople above.

Once again as with Sweet Movie this is a huge generalization of a very complex and difficult film. The film is filled with religious symbols, psychological exploration, and violence. El Topo is God, El Topo is us, El Topo is the devil. The film has a very loose narrative structure, giving it time to explore more complex and difficult territory.

Check this one out if you're in the mood for something truly unique and difficult. This one's for fans of David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Shinya Tsukomoto etc.

Gore- medium
Nudity - some
Overall - 7/10

Spiral (2007) 6/10

Spiral is the first feature directed by Joel Moore (actor, hatchet) and Adam Green (director hatchet). I believe this was completed before Hatchet as it feels much more "student film-ish." The film was written by and stars Joel Moore, so this was really his baby, much like Hatchet was Adam Green's baby.

The film is about social misfit Mason and his obsession with painting. Mason is a corporate insurance salesman and meets the girl of his dreams at work. He begins sketching and painting her, as well as finally coming out of his shell. Once the girl finds out that he's painted many many girls before her and his possibly nefarious past, things go from romance flick to psychological thriller in a heart beat.

The film is adequately directed though it does come off as a first feature of a student, rather then the first feature of a qualified experienced director. The pacing is quick and the plot never really slows down. The acting is also adequate and the story has the requisite twist within a twist and works well.

In the end though there isn't enough to make Spiral stand out in the crowded psychological thriller genre. This one's for fans of Hatchet and mediocrity.

Overall - 6/10

Sweet Movie (1974) 7/10

Sweet Movie is a film by Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, and truly defies categorization and criticism.

Sweet Movie was made in 1974 and takes place in the "future" of 1984. The Miss World Virginity Competition has announced their winner, the most beautiful virgin in the world. Her prize is to be married to the world's richest man, a brash American tycoon. On their honeymoon she discovers her husband has a gold penis and so she tries to run away and begins her bizarre oddessy. At the same time there is another storyline within the film that isn't related to Miss Virginity. A woman is floating down a canal in Amsterdam in a large gypsy boat that has a huge paper mache head of Carl Marx on the bow. She picks up a sailor and they both travel along, picking up children, children never to be seen again.

That's a pretty basic synopsis of the film. There's really alot more going on but to dig deeper would just confuse the reader and give away too much. The film maker was kicked out of communist Yugoslavia for making "subversive" films and continued his career elsewhere in Europe. This film is filled with nudity, sex, and bizarre imagery. The overall plot is up to you to decide, I have my own conclusions but the film doesn't come right out and explain everything.

This film is for adventurous viewers that don't mind being confused and are looking for a challenge. The film truly sits by itself and cannot be easily compared to other films but I imagine if you like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Shinya Tsukumoto, etc then this is certainly worth checking out. I found the film highly entertaining and I never felt the pace slow or become boring. I had no idea where the film was going to go minute to minute, but in this case it worked marvelously well.

Nudity - medium
Overall - 7/10

Love Camp 7 (1969) 4/10

Supposedly Love Camp 7 is the first in the obscure line of nazisploitation films of the 70's. It was one of the original video nasties from the U.K. video ban in the mid 80's and is still banned there. The film has become one of the most obscure of an already obscure sub-genre of a sub-genre, and rightfully so.

Love Camp 7 chronicles two female spies planted in a Nazi brothel by British Officials. Their mission is to find an important scientist whom is imprisoned within the camp and plan an escape so that her information can be acquired by the allies.

This one is quite a stinker. The plot is dreadfully slow and like most nazisploitation films is filled with nudity, bordering on sexploitation. The film has almost no action and is super low budget. Most of the plot involves high ranking officials torturing and raping women. Not my cup of tea. So the film is repulsive and boring at the same time. I didn't think that was possible but here I stand corrected. If you haven't already, check out Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS or SS Hell Camp for nazisploitation that doesn't dissappoint.

Bottom line: the film is for video nasty & nazisploitation completists only.

Gore - mild
Nudity- tons
Overall - 4/10

Flesheater (1988) 5/10

Flesheater was written and directed by Bill Hinzman, zombie star of Night Of The Living Dead. I guess he decided to cash into his new found fame during the 80's zombie boom. Perhaps he shouldn't have.

Flesheater is about a group of kids in the woods who get attacked by zombies. Thats about it. The run, they scream, they die. The townsfolk get involved, they run, they scream, they die. The film does not reinvent the wheel, which is fine because I didn't expect it to. Generic horror is fine with me so long as its executed mildly well. This one is not.

The problem with this film is the terrible acting and lack of energy. Sure there's some good gore but I just don't care because the film doesn't draw me in. I'm not a part of the action, I'm just passively viewing. The lack of energy really kills any worth the film would have had. Which is a shame because simple stories like this can really focus on the characters since the plot is so well worn. Somehow flesheater misses this opportunity and becomes a yawn fest because of it. The film proves that gore and T & A do not always make a watchable horror flick.

Gore - medium
Nudity - some
Overall - 5/10

Splatter: Naked Blood (1995) 6/10

Splatter: Naked Blood was touted as another mid 90's asian gorefests along with Dr. Lamb, the Untold Story, Evil Dead Trap etc. While the gore content isn't as high as the aforementioned flicks, it is extreme.

Naked Blood tells the story of a high school aged chemist that creates a new pain killer that changes the body's pain receptors into pleasure zones. He sneaks a dose into his mother's all female birth control test group and the horrible masochistic sexualized self torture begins.

The film's relatively short running time of 76 minutes helps keep the film on track though it still manages to drag a bit. The gore is pretty damn extreme and fairly realistic for a low budget asian nasty. There's really nothing to note about the film, its really for asian freaks and gorehounds only. The film doesn't dig too deep, its more just an excuse to show asian women mutilate themselves. The director, as I found out after watching the film, has made a career out of making adult films, most of which involve rape. This is very repulsive to me and had I known this I wouldn't have bothered with Splatter: Naked blood, and I wouldn't have been missing much.

Gorehounds and asian freaks only.

Gore - high
Nudity - some
Overall - 6/10

Descent (2007) 7/10

Descent is the pet project of Rosario Dawson who also stars. Without her "star power" I doubt a film this extreme would have ever been made, let alone distributed.

Descent is about a young woman in college's plunge into hell after being raped by her boyfriend. She spends her summer in a dark dingy club listening to bad music and hanging out with worse people. She gets involved in the drug world and loses touch with herself and reality. Somehow she manages to pull it together to resume classes where she is confronted by the presence of her rapist. She then decides to "empower" herself and take revenge. And what a revenge it is.

I won't give away just how that revenge is exacted but lets just say the film earns its NC-17 rating.

The problem with the film is that many sequences are shot in extreme low light and it becomes very difficult to make out just what the hell we're trying to look at. This is increasingly frustrating as the film progresses but thankfully lightens up (though not thematically) towards the end. The film is also slowly paced but bearably so. The initial rape feels very intimate and realistic, hightening the revulsion factor. It is truly hard to witness. The relationships she develops after the event really don't make much sense and we never really see much of those "dark days." The film ends up feeling like a long setup and a long release but no middle act.

Overall Descent is a truly brutal film that brings to light the all too real college rape statistics. If you can deal with murky lighting and slow pacing, and want to test your mettle check this one out.

Overall 7/10

Rambo (2007) 9/10

I grew up on Sylvester Stallone, watching films like Over The Top, Rocky (all of em), First Blood, Cobra and many many more. The guy fills a special place in my heart along with Van Damme, and Arnold. I recently went back and re-watched the Rambo Trilogy to be all Rambo-ed up for this newest feature. I had very high expectations after seeing the gore filled teaser several months ago and after watching all the previous films. I also really enjoyed Rocky Balboa so the bar was set high to say the least.

Did the film meet my expectations? Two words: HELL YES!

Rambo sees our titular character living simply in Thailand as a fisherman/blacksmith/snake catcher. After watching the previous films this makes perfect sense because Rambo was never able to fit into normal modern American society after the Vietnam War. Living out in the jungle is in his blood. A group of missionaries come to him to take them up the river into Burma in his boat so that they can give medical attention to the Karen Rebels that are being killed by the Burmese army. This is actually happening as we speak. There is a huge civil war going on and has been going on for 60 years. Stallone picked Burma to shoot and set the film to draw more attention to the conflict there. It sounds far fetched but he really wanted to do some good with Rambo and more power to him. In the beginning of the film during the credits we see numerous pictures and video footage of real victims of the war. He's trying to tell us that although the film is a ficition, these things do actually happen, if not this dramatically.

The story is totally solid as one might expect since Stallone co-wrote the film and all of his best films are penned by him. (First blood and Rocky being two of them). But is the action as extreme as the original trailer shows?

Yup. This is hands down the most graphically violent film I have ever seen in the theater. I have no idea how this passed through the MPAA in it's current form. People are burned alive, shot in half, decapitated, blown up, raped, dismembered, disemboweled, you name it, it's here. Children even die for crying out loud. We see the Burmese army wreaking atrocity after atrocity, so when Rambo gets into action the viewer wants all of the evil miltary personel to die horrible deaths. And indeed they do. Once the action starts it doesn't let up. The last shootout in the film was espeicailly brutal and especially long. I figured the final act would be a cop out but no, it really delivers. The final ending to the film is also very satisfying.

Overall if you don't go see this in the theatre, you're fool. Period. I've already seen it in the theatre and I may go again, and i've never done that in my life. This movie is gold.

Gore- tons

Nudity- none

Overall - 9/10

Nekromantic 2 (1991) 3/10

So I watched the original Nekromantic a couple of years ago and was simultaneously disgusted and bored. I didn't think it was possible but the German flick proved me wrong. I figured since the sequal actually got made and was produced about 5 years after the original, I thought the script would be better. Nope. In fact it's worse.

If you couldn't figure it out from the title Nekromantic 2 is about a woman who loves the dead. I mean loves the dead. Sounds like a gross but possibly entertaining idea right? Wrong. The film is mostly filled with useless dialogue scenes, character's walking sequences, and other garbage material. There is a pretty good does of necrophilia and dismemberment but its super disgusting and difficult to watch. This would have been tolerable if the rest of the film backed it up but it's almost as if the Writer/Director didn't know how to fill a feature length film with anything of substance. It seems like he just wanted to gross the audience out and play the rest of the film off like a piece of arthouse garbage. Well he suceeded, but only half way. The film is much too exploitative to be taken seriously and too pretentious to just simply laugh off.

So, if you really want to be grossed out then just FWD to all the gross out scenes and skip the rest.

Nudity - medium

Gore- medium-high

Overall - 3/10

A Boy And His Dog (1975) 6/10

I love post apocalyptic flicks and I like Don Johnson so I figured A Boy And His Dog could'nt lose. I was fairly right.

A Boy And His Dog is a film based on a novella by Harlan Ellison which is yet another plus to this film. In traditional Ellison style the film is filled with dark and sometimes crude humor that tickles me just fine. The film stars a very young Don Johnson as a surivor of a nuclear war during WWIV. Yeah they just skip WWIII and go straight to 4, pretty awesome huh? Don has a telepathic link with a highly intellegent dog and they set out in search of food and women. Eventually Don is lured underground to a secret community and becomes their love prisoner, dispensing his precious seed to the women of the colony. He breaks out and chases ensue.

The film moves along at a quick pace, never becomming slow or dull. The film makers use their limited budget wisely to create a pretty believable future work with only using a few props. The acting is pretty good too and the interaction between the main character and the dog is highly entertaining. Great low budget sci-fi flick to enjoy on a lazy afternoon.

One special note for this one: The ending makes the film. Don't give up before the very end, you won't be sorry.

Overall - 6/10

The Majorettes (1986) 5/10

The Majorettes is yet another film in the long line of 80's slasher flicks, too bad it stands at the back.

The Majorettes as you might imagine is about a troupe of high school majorettes getting murdered one by one by a camoflauged madman.

The film has terrible acting on par with late night infomercials. Because of this it's hard to watch and not fall asleep. The actors seem like they're bored, so why wouldn't I be? On the plus side the violence is fairly graphic with most of the girls getting their throats slit ala maniac. The problem is that after an hour only 4 deaths occur and 2 of them happen before the credits. So theres lots of awful dialogue with some murders sprinkled throughout.

Bottom line: The film's acting kills the film. The violence is pretty graphic but there's really not enough to keep the viewer interested.

Gore - mild-medium
Nudity- medium
Overall - 5/10