10-10 4-U #1: UndUlating, Ubiquitous & completely Unrelated

Army of Darkness needs to be up there. Return of the Living Dead I guess fits the definition (if you’re into zombie movies, check both out).

I hear Caligula has been denounced pretty much by both Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell.

Speaking of Malcolm McDowell, who was great in A Clockwork Orange, he sucked as Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween II.

I never understood why they remade that movie. Halloween was a classic.

Bubba Ho-Tep, however, was Bruce Campbell’s finest film, in my opinion. That movie has so much to recommend it.

Clockwork Orange was a great, great movie.

Shaun of the Dead hard to beat for great bad horror as is Dusk til Dawn. Really good bad horror there and with Keitel and Clooney etc. not a bad cast.

For Halloween it’s hard to beat Young Frankenstein and if you want hilarious, try TV Series Ghost Hunters.

I liked Tony Scott’s Domino, it seems he applied all the visual techniques he experimented with in making music videos and the bmw short and turned it into a full-length feature film about bounty hunters. With Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Lucy Lui, and a slew of second tier stars I feel the movie excels in story-telling without telling a story. Instead, Scott uses the aforementioned visual techniques like double exposure, playing with color, split-second flashbacks and an ever-changing music score to establish mood and feeling. Anyway, I loved the movie, and believe the catch-phrase tells everything. Based on a true story…. sort of.

28 Days later was great, again I don’t know if it should be considered a ‘cult’ movie as it was a european blockbuster in the theatres and did extremely well in dvd sales for the US. Made on a small budget, my favorite writer Alex Garland and Danny Boyle team up to make a explore what people live for in a post-apocalyptic world. Rage infected humans (basically mobile zombies) flood Britain destroying civilization as they know it, but the true enemy comes when Cillian Murhpy and a random chick and a father-daughter set out to find civilization. Lot’s of great visuals, and I love the ultimate enemy. I also love how the viewer is simply tossed into the post-apocalyptic world, rather than witnessing its slow deterioration.

Sunshine, another Garland Boyle project, only this one was considered a flop and had a good sized budget (spent on some dazzling visual effects). A Sci-fi film, and again humanity is facing extinction. A crew of 8 astronauts and scientists launch into a virtual suicide mission to reignite the sun, but as they grow closer to the source for all life (i.e. god) must deal with the pressure of all humanity and all existence, in an environment where the slightest mundane problem means failure, death, and the end of humanity. The human condition under this stress is again explored, I just wish they didn’t bypass the traditional boring set-up stage of space movies, and gave an extra 7-10 minutes for character development at the beginning of the movie.

Halloween, the original, my favorite horror movie, and I’ve seen a ton of horror movies. Established the formula for the slasher genre, and developed one of the most recognizable theme songs of all time.

Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s second quietest movie after Jackie Brown. Features all the great dialogue you expect from tarantino, with some of the best car chase action sequences ever captured on film. I also believe Tarantino brought out the best performance in Kurt Russell ever. Great music, nice cars, likeable characters, good movie.

It’s spelled ubiquitous.

- The Final Countdown No, not the song. This very underrated 1980 film starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross is about the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier being sucked into a time warp and thrown back in time to December 6, 1941. Knowing that they have the tools and the knowledge to stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, do they go through with it and change the future?

Don Taylor, whose only other notable directing efforts were 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes and 1977’s The Island of Dr. Moreau does a pretty good job mixing together Time Traveling Sci-Fi with Naval Air Combat. The film contains solid performances by both Douglas and Sheen, and actual air combat with F-14 Tomcats and T-6 Texans (mocked up to look like Japanese Zeroes).

If you want a film that’s like Top Gun but without the so-so “homoerotic undertones” and a dash of sci-fi, this is a flick to definitely check out sometime.

Here’s a quick run-down of my other four:
- Heavy Metal – This Canadian animated anthology overseen by “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman successfully mixes sci-fi, exploitation and action with early hair metal and rock and roll. Of course, a lot of people didn’t see eye-to-eye with this mish-mash of tastes and to this day it’s hard finding people around me that are willing to sit down and watch it with me.

- Alien 3 (but only the The Director’s Cut) – This film will always be an example of how rushed work is sloppy work in Hollywood. David Fincher, who is currently making headlines with the major critical hit “The Social Network,” made his directorial debut with this mess in 1992. Forced to work with a hackneyed script, lousy editors and poor shooting conditions amongst other problems, the film as it was released in 1992 was just downright bad. However, The Alien 3 Director’s Cut he put together when the DVDs of the Alien series were released in 2003 is far, FAR better, restoring scenes that fill most of the plot holes and pad the story much better.

- The Iron Giant – While it’s finally getting some better recognition nowadays, for a while it was the greatest animated film that no one knew about. Before Brad Bird would go to Pixar to do “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille,” he directed this heartfelt, ultimately anti-war flick while at Warner Bros.

- Kelly’s Heroes I’m pretty sure this 1970 flick is classified as a cult film, considering that no one ever talks about it. It has Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, Donald Sutherland and Carroll O’Connor. That’s one hell of a cast don’t you think? The film is about Eastwood leading a group of rogue U.S. Soldiers through Nazi-occupied France to steal $16 Million USD in Nazi Gold. Not the world’s best WWII action flick, but a pretty darn good one that successfully mixes action with comedy very well.

Oh, and Ravenous, have you seen The Cinema Snob’s review of Caligula? It’s his most favorite film of all time!