Now first, let me give you a quick plot synopsis: a group of doctors and scientists are taken to a small New Mexico town where all of the inhabitants died instantly after a satellite carrying a virus from another galaxy infects them. While there, the scientists investigate the dead people (some of whom are having their eyes eaten by birds) and discover that the corpses have dried blood that pours out like sand. So sets forth a scientific investigation into what the alien virus is and how it kills so fast… all while the president is threatening to nuke all of New Mexico to stop the spread of the virus. If that’s not the plot of a G-Rated film then I don’t know what is! Why would a kid want Rapunzel or Winnie the Pooh when they can have corpse eye-munching birds and sand blood pouring from a slit wrist?!?

Damn your eyes… Too late!

In the film there is not one but THREE scenes of nudity (one is particularly shocking in that it is a dead, topless hippy woman). Also, there are many, many scenes of violence and general mayhem. Not that any of them are any more violent or shocking than the newest C.S.I. episode, but this film was actually marketed to families and children.

This made me think about other 70’s films that had scenes that would never even be in a PG-13 movie today. The 1976 film, Logan’s Run, has several scenes with a fully nude Jenny Agutter (known mostly for her role in An American Werewolf in London) that would guarantee it an R Rating today but it was PG. Philip Kaufman’s brilliant sequel/remake Invasion of the Body Snatcher has extremely horrific scenes of alien clones growing and then having their heads graphically bashed in (not to mention a topless chase scene at the end) and that one was PG too. Then there is the original Planet of the Apes with several scenes of a nude Charlton Heston (and two other beefcake astronauts) and apes torturing humans that was rated G. These films also deal with situations and themes that are definitely not for kids and not just because they are too adult, but also because kids would never understand them!

This is just one of the disturbing scenes in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It gave Dusty nightmares too!

I understand that the ratings system was still a fairly new thing (first going in effect in 1967) and there were only four ratings: G (general audiences), PG (parental guidance), R (restricted) and X (explicit), but the fact that these films were marketed toward children is simply insane. Now, I’m not a conservative creep saying kids can’t handle these things, but it’s just so strange when comparing it to the present day. The ratings are so strict that no movie can use “fuck” more than twice without gaining an R rating ( and both uses must be non-sexual) and VERY few films have nudity without being rated R (I know everyone is thinking ” but wait, wait pal, what about Titanic?”). When it comes to violence, if blood is shown, it usually gains an R. For example, The Dark Knight Rises was able to have as many people as they wanted getting shot, as long as no blood was shown.

I don’t really know what to think about this, it was just something strange I was thinking about while watching Andromeda Strain. What do you guys think? Can you think of other G or PG rated flicks that contained nudity, extreme violence or obscene language?

Now first off, I must begin by saying that I love the new Marvel films that began with Iron Man. I was so happy that Marvel finally figured out how to incorporate their mythology into a series of films that were at once standalone comic book pictures but also part of a larger storyline. With each new Marvel film, I was so excited to see Captain America’s shield showing up on Tony Stark’s work counter or talk of the Super Soldier Serum in Incredible Hulk because I knew The Avengers was coming. And when it did, it was FANTASTIC!

Iron Man 3 is in a tough spot already since it’s the first standalone Marvel film after The Avengers. The fact that they chose Iron Man (obviously the most popular and liked Avenger) is smart but still makes one yearn for Avengers 2. The entire film I kept hoping Thor or the Hulk would jump in and help out Tony Stark when he is fighting hordes of villains, but sadly, *SPOILER ALERT* they never do.

When I heard Shane Black would be writing and directing the new Iron Man I was ecstatic! I absolutely love Lethal Weapon, Monster Squad, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and thought he would be bring an amazing new voice to the superhero film. After seeing the movie, you can definitely tell Black was involved (whether it is Stark’s narration where he messes up and begins again ala Kiss Kiss or the film noir and buddy film tropes all of his films possess or it’s Christmas setting), in the end it just feels like another overblown superhero movie.

I can enjoy an overblown superhero movie any day of the week (I LOVE The Incredible Hulk) but Iron Man 3 has a mid-movie plot twist that absolutely ruined the entire film for me. Now the twist is very clever and definitely unexpected (don’t worry I won’t ruin it) but it made me feel the exact same way I did when I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. For those who haven’t seen The Village, stop now and continue to the next paragraph. Ok, those who are still here, WHY THE HELL DID HE MAKE THE MONSTERS FAKE?!?!? Everyone always mentions the so-called “BIG” twist that the village is actually in the modern-day and not the 1600’s as you believe, but that one doesn’t really ruin it for me. The fact that he made the monsters a made-up parlor trick to scare the villagers into submission is simply idiotic. How can you be scared again? Why even watch it again when you know those horrific beasts are actually assholes in homemade suits? This is how I felt in Iron Man 3. I literally almost walked out when the twist happened. It ruined the mythology the films had created and made the entire movie a joke.

Now, not everything is bad. Ben Kingsley makes a FANTASTIC villain out of the Mandarin. He is a character cloaked in mystery and feels completely dangerous. The way he talks is simply creepy and awesome and a much better villain for Tony Stark to fight than a bald Dude or a Russian Mickey Roarke. The film noir and mystery aspect of the film is great. Most of the movie, Stark acts as a detective (much like Bruce Wayne) attempting to solve and avenge his friend’s recent attack and injury. It’s a very cool addition to the series and gives the film a new style to play with. The film also does a good job treating the events that happened in The Avengers as a trigger for Stark’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Tony Stake has always been the most “human” Avenger and the fact that he has panic attacks after going through the wormhole in Avengers makes him even more relatable.

Overall, I give it a 14/17 on the Sitz-o-Matic scale. It is the first big disappointment of the year and quite possibly the worst of the new Marvel films. Please see it and tell me what you think! I have a feeling that my reaction to the film might be completely different than everyone else.

Top 5 “Phase 1″ Marvel Films:
1. The Avengers
2. Iron Man
3. Thor
4. Captain America: The First Avenger
5. The Incredible Hulk

I love that the blurb for this poster comes from Sex Gore Mutants. Brilliant!

The film was actually pretty awesome. The “infected people” basically look like bad make-up Lepers (Dustin described them as looking like the Toxic Avenger) and they constantly attack and bite people’s necks and drink their blood like they are vampires. If I didn’t know better, I would think that Danny Boyle and Alex Garfield saw this film before making 28 Days Later but since Boyle is so adamant that his film is NOT a horror film and doesn’t share anything with the horror genre, I would suspect this wasn’t the case. But the monsters in this film do share many characteristics with those infected with the RAGE virus: they’re fast, they’re angry, and they’re super violent for no explicable reason.

Like many Italian zombie flicks of the era, this one is filled with gratuitous gore and nudity (and a wonderful disco dance scene added in case we get bored). Sometimes the two meet as when one unlucky dancer (in the aforementioned disco dance show) gets her breast cut off and eaten. The dubbing is fairly bad and sometimes the dialogue literally made no sense at all. You won’t find any award-winning acting either, but Stiglitz DOES do all of his stunts and wields a gun and hatchet fairly well.

Aside from an ending that makes no sense at all (and nearly ruins the rest of the film), Nightmare City is a fun, gory film for fans of Lucio Fulci (Zombi 2, City of the Living Dead), Romero and other Italio-zombie films. I give it a 14 out of 17 on the Sitz-O-Matic Scale.

As an added bonus, Quentin Tarantino has a funny story about a time when Eli Roth met Lenzi and told him Tarantino was a big fan of his “zombie” film, Nightmare City, and Lenzi began yelling (in a strong Italian accent) “they are not zombies, they are INFECTED PEOPLE!”

This week, I watched the “shockumentary” Goodbye Uncle Tom by the Italian documentarians Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Here is a quick film history lesson, friends! Jacopetti and Prosperi invented the shockumentary with Mondo Cane (1962) which was basically a showcase of the most absurd, shocking events they could find around the world. While these films began as real documentaries, most of them started incorporating fake reenactments and gore effects until they became pure exploitation. They continued into the 1980’s with the popular Faces of Death series (which I refuse to watch) and fake snuff films and eventually died out with the invent of the Internet.

Goodbye Uncle Tom begins with Jacopetti and Prosperi somehow traveling back in time to the per-Civil War American south to make a documentary on slavery. The strangest thing about this is that the film never makes it seem absurd or strange in the slightest. They just wanted to make a doc on slavery so they jumped in their helicopter, gunned it to 88 MPH and automatically ended up back in time. When they arrive, all the slaves and slave owners simply wave at the helicopter as it blows about their bushels of cotton. Inexplicably they don’t find it weird that a flying machine with giant blades appeared out of nowhere. The filmmakers begin to interview people around the south but never mention the fact that they’re carrying cameras which would obviously seem strange to these people. Famous “celebrities” like Harriot Beecher Stowe show up randomly to give insight on slavery. Very strange. It actually confused the hell out of me that a movie like this can get made and no one at any point ever mentioned how weird the time travel aspect is.

When it comes to their depiction of slavery, they hold nothing back. A title card at the beginning reads “THIS FILM IS COMPLETELY TRUE. NOTHING WAS FABRICATED FOR ENTERTAINMENT” At one point a slave ship is shown with literally hundreds of naked men chained together in tiny bunk beds as they are urinating and diarrhea’ing all over each other. The men are fed pig fat, cornmeal and grain. One slave refuses to eat so they jam a large chisel in his mouth, break his teeth with a hammer and force feed him the “food”. The entire film is filled with these scenes of extreme depravity and gruesomeness. I read an interview with the filmmakers where they claim to have made the film in response to being called racist following their earlier Mondo shockumentaries. While i applaud their decision to graphically show American slavery in excruciating detail, the way they do it is just wrong on so many levels. Many of the scenes show gratuitous amounts of female and male nudity not for “historical accuracy” but titillation. The fact that they are exploiting such a disgusting part of American history makes them seem even more irresponsible, if not racist.

I don’t think I can recommend this movie to anyone unless they are in the mood for something horribly offensive, depressing and gross. It ranks alongside Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, Cannibal Holocaust and Men Behind the Sun (about the Japanese experimenting on the Chinese during WWII) as one of the most disturbing, shocking films I’ve ever seen. I give it a 10/17 only because I can’t stop thinking about it.

Eli Roth does a fantastic commentary of the trailer over at the great website Trailers From Hell. Check it out!

This poster TOTALLY rips off Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

See, same poster!

After reading the short synopsis of the Norwegian film Headhunters, I figured it was gonna be a thriller in the vein of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (and as the poster eloquently reminded me, the films share a producer). What I wasn’t expecting was a brilliant dark comedy mixed with extreme violence and gore.

Roger Brown (a VERY strange name for a Norwegian) is a recruiter (or “headhunter”) for major corporations with a beautiful wife and a beautiful home that looks like a showroom at Ikea. To pay for his extravagant lifestyle, Brown steals works of art from the rich men he recruits with the aid of Ove Kjikerud (now THAT’S a Norwegian name), a gun loving security guard. Everything is going great until he meets Clas Greve (played by Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones, looking like a real-life Prince Charming from Shrek). Soon, his head is being hunted (get it, the title works both ways… those clever Norsemen) and he doesn’t know who is after him, or why they are trying so hard to kill him. Do they know he is a thief? Does this mysterious hunk Clas want his beautiful wife?

The film reminded me several times of the Coen Brothers. The tone is most like that of No Country For Old Men with people getting double crossed at every turn. There are also scenes of sudden, extreme violence that sometimes literally made me cringe. As many know, I’ve seen some truly messed up movies in my day, so if a movie can make ME cringe, it MUST be good! I give it a 14/17.

I love Mondo posters. They’re the best!

Next up is another film that surprised me: Seven Psychopaths. I had wanted to see this movie mainly because the director, Martin McDonagh made the vastly underrated In Bruges. I loved that film but after first seeing the trailer to Psychopaths, I lost most of my excitement (oddly enough, the trailer for In Bruges was also off putting and lame, this guy needs a new trailer editor). When it came out on DVD, I figured I would give it a chance and it was fantastic!

The film tells of a guy, Colin Farrell, writing a screenplay about 7 psychopaths. His best friend, played by the always brilliant Sam Rockwell, steals dogs with Christopher Walken and collects the rewards. They steal a local mafioso’s shih tzu and all hell breaks loose.

That’s right boys and girls! Tom Waits is in this and he is crazy as always.

The best way to describe this film would be Adaptation directed by Guy Ritchie. As the film progresses, the script Farrell is writing begins to become the film we are watching. It all becomes meta and self-referential, which sounds pretentious, but the film handles it in a very laid-back fashion without pounding the audience over the head with its cleverness. As with Headhunters, Seven Psychopaths was far more violent than I expected. Some of it I was actually surprised got past those wonderful censors at the MPAA. But the film also has moments of extreme sadness and beauty. When people die in the movie, it isn’t used for laughs as in other dark comedies. Instead, McDonagh understands the seriousness of death and isn’t so low as to use it as a gag. I give this one a 16/17. Check it out!!!