Tag Archive

Drive Angry/Faster/My Soul to Take/I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

By Adam Lippe

When will disreputable nihilism become boring? Hopefully never. But there comes a point where self-satisfied nastiness taken to an extreme needs a little bit of flavor to distinguish itself. Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry tries to spice things up with its effective use of 3D and by cobbling together as many exploitation clichés as possible: the […]

The Expendables

By Adam Lippe

Do you remember 200 Cigarettes? You know, the ‘80s nostalgia-fest about the ultimate New Year’s Eve party being thrown by Martha Plimpton, and the various vignettes involving those who will end up at said party? The 1999 film where Kate Hudson spends a lot of the movie covered in dog poop, Christina Ricci and Gaby […]

Predators

By Adam Lippe

After learning that I disliked his horror movie, a director at a film festival spent two days trying to confront me. I tried to be nice about it, complimenting the things I did enjoy such as the cinematography and how much he was able to get out of his obviously limited budget. He pestered me […]

District 9 Review and Podcast

By Adam Lippe

Below you’ll find a review of Neill Bloomkamp’s Action-Sci-fi hybrid, District 9. I’m also including a podcast about the film which I conducted with the official mascot for Hamburger Helper, Helping Hand. Click the play icon to listen to the podcast. Or you can download the podcast here. (Right-click, Save Link As…) The downside of […]

Skeleton Crew

By Adam Lippe

The easiest way for filmmakers to get themselves out of being painted into the corner is with a deus ex machina. Sometimes that deus ex machina is a lapse of logic, like Samuel L. Jackson driving on the highway and looking out his window at the exact moment Bruce Willis flies out of a water […]

Outlander

By Adam Lippe

A promisingly silly premise, alien spaceship crashes into the water during the time of Vikings and the survivor tries to win the hearts of the humans who don’t understand him (A more appropriate title might have been Army of Dorkness), is buried in the ground immediately by a concession to the English speaking market. As soon as he lands, removes his protective […]

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.