They Live!

I'm a sucker for anti-consumerism movies and They Live is the crown jewel. Here are some reasons you should join us for the screening for this fabulous movie:

The glasses: Nothing feels worse than having the wool pulled over your eyes. Conversely, nothing feels better than ripping that wool away! When Piper puts on the sunglasses for the first time and sees things as they really are, many things we feel deep down to be true are confirmed in the most satisfying way. There's no explaining it away; we are being manipulated by a higher class, and we have to rise up and smash the overlords! (In the movie of course...)

Longest friendly fight scene in history: Roddy Piper and Keith David pound each other for 6 min straight, it's amazing! What are they fighting over? Piper just wants his friend to put on the glasses!

Origin of the line: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubble gum.”

Shepard Fairy: His “OBEY” theme has it's roots in this film's subliminal advertising campaign.

Meg Foster: With her terrifyingly pretty blue eyes.

Ultimately, this is a quintessential wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee movie wrapped in an epic 80s action movie. Come enjoy it on the big screen again, or for the first time, with us tonight at The Theaters of MOA (on 35mm). Movie starts at 7:30 and Tim will have screen prints of his poster design for this series for sale at the theater!

Psssst hey!: If you can't make it to the screening but want a poster Tim has them up for sale on his Timmonsters Etsy page. (I totally see the irony of shilling here, but it's a badass poster!)

Escape from New York

If you've forgotten how wonderful Escape from New York is, here are some reminders:

Snake Plissken: His past is so checkered the movie won't even tell us about it. Why is he infamous? Why does everyone think he's dead? How Brain double-cross him in the past? And how did he lose his eye? Filling in our own holes [intended!] is far more fun than anything the movie could offer, but really, even his mysteries are shrouded in mystery.

Full drag cabaret: Four guys in Victorian style drag, accompanied by a gypsy-bohemian band, sing the catchiest song known to man to a theater speckled with solemn criminals. Either the seedy audience takes theater very seriously or they are completely unmoved by anything. Except for Ernest Borgnine who is bouncing in his seat with glee...

Cabbie: It's always a good time when Ernest Borgnine shows up in a film, but this is our favorite of his later roles. Cabbie is fun, cowardly, full of convenient timing; no one could have done it better.

Green grids of the future: It's easy to take shots at Si-Fi missing the mark on their future technology, but this movie makes it hard to know where to start. Maybe the mobile phone that is larger than any object we've ever seen placed to someones ear. Maybe the tracking device that is a red dot on a mostly unmarked grid. Maybe the super top secret government information recorded to a audio cassette tape...

The supporting cast dreams are made of: Lee Van Cleef, Adrienne Barbeau, Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Tom Atkins, and Donald Pleasence as the President! If you asked for more, you'd just be greedy!

A soundtrack to stand the test of time: Uniquely minimalistic and dark for electronic music at the time, it was as influential to electronic musicians then as it is now. It's arguably the best Carpenter/Howarth collaboration, and it's a soundtrack well worn in our house.

Really, you should just watch Escape from New York again! You missed your shot to see it on the big screen, but that should just get you more motivated to get out and see Escape from L.A.! 

(Pssssst, hey! If you're a Carpenter soundtrack dork too, check out Drokk, Symmetry, or Umberto, you likely won't be disappointed!)

Good Bye Filmzilla

Last night, Tim got a text from a friend expressing how bummed he was to hear Filmzilla had closed forever. Startled, Tim took to the internet and through some unexpectedly extensive digging, he discovered that yesterday as employees came into work, they were informed it was to be the last day for Filmzilla. There was no talk of closure, no rumors, no plan, just a notice to employees that they would be closed for ever at midnight that night. We discovered all of this at 11:15pm. Tim had to get up at 5:30 this morning and was already up too late, but we grabbed our coats and jumped into the van to scour the impeccably stocked shelves one last time.

Upon entering Filmzilla, we were greeted by a few groups of people waiting at the counter with stacks of movies to purchase and (to our surprise) rent. It was an even split of people who had never been through the door before, and people who were we were witnessing a place they loved be picked over by vultures. Appropriately, Clerks was playing on the TV behind the counter and when there were just 3 customers left the younger employee asked his manager if there were smoke detectors in the store. She told him she smoked in there all the time and he lit a cigarette purely to smoke inside while they were still open. As each customer was rang up they were asked if they had rented there before, but when it was our turn, we were met with "You've rented here before right?". I asked our clerk if we could have some of the empty DVD cases with the Filmzilla and Nicollet Village stickers on them, and she found some in the back for us.

Filmzilla was one of the last video rental stores in the Twin Cities that catered to a wide audience. There are still some specific language rental places, the county and city libraries, but nothing like the video stores we grew up with. Tim and I looked forward to, at least once a month, ordering take out from True Thai and while waiting for our order, venturing across the street to rent a stack of movies. It is something that we are going to miss, and likely something we won't find a substitute for.

Tim and I were the last customers in line, and the last customers to leave the store. We took photos of the outside of the place lit up one last time, and as we did the open sign was switched off, for the last time ever. It was a suddenly sad night, we're sorry to see Filmzilla go.

UPDATE: Investigate further, but I have heard rumors that they will be selling off their stock at the store until Friday this week. I can't find any evidence of this on the interwebs, but if you want hard to find DVDs at the lowest market price, head down there now!

The Greatest Night Ever.

With cinematic oddities, exploitation, voice overs, and so much more, Trailer Trash is a presentation of vintage trailers in 35mm glory! Audience participation, promises a unique blend of cult classics, karate masters, little lost dogs and laser blasts for each screening! We'll be at the 7:30 and 10 showings because (full disclosure) parts of the program are straight from our own collection! (We're so excited, every sentence of this blurb has ended in an exclamation point!)!

Trailer Trash @ MOA Theaters, May 9th 7:30 & 10:00, $7

Tape Freaks Movie Night

The other night we had a movie party, our guests picked the line up and they chose some amazing flicks. Here's a rundown:

Never Too Young To Die

Lance Stargrove (John Stamos) is your average college student/star gymnast who's dad (George Lazenby) is never around. Lucky for Stargrove, his father is killed during a secret mission, leaving him to discover his father's secret life, his spy partner Danja (Vanity) and his arch nemesis Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons). Stargrove quickly fills his father's spy shoes with help from his science-minded gadget-building friend, falls in love with Danja and saves the water supply from Ragner's evil plot. The glorious soundtrack features, at minimum, 4 variants on the Stargrove Theme, each explicitly emphasizing the many facets of Stargrove's characters surroundings. Sadly for us, this movie's cries to be picked up as a series went unanswered, it's sequel could have been glorious.

Things to watch for: A theme song that will haunt you for years to come; the second most awkward love scene ever [see Ninja III for the first]; the inexplicable stage ”performance” of Ragner; Robert Enguland as a computer whiz; John Stamos definitely doing impressive gymnastics and not having a double do it; the worst fake beard ever to grace the silver screen; Gene Simmons as a hermaphrodite drag-queen gang-leader; a post apocalyptic gang living in a suburban 80s world; and every character asking for the “RAM-K”'s location over, and over, and over again.

Ninja III: The Domination

[Full disclosure, we don't know how Ninja II ended, so we were pretty surprised when...] Ninja III jumps into the action head first as most of the L.A. police force is slashed, dropped, drown, and ninja stared to death. The cops are on the scene responding to a out-of-the-clear-blue ninja-murder of a golfer and his entire golfing party. The cop-massacre ends when our ninja is filled with more bullets than I've ever seen a guy filled with on screen, and wanders into the desert to die. Luckily he runs into Christie, our plucky utilities worker/aerobics instructor; he gives Christie his sword, causing his spirit to possess her body. Christie reports most of this to the police, where she meets Officer Billy Secord, a tenacious cop who stalks her until she agrees jump into a serious relationship with him. One by one, Christie picks off the cops that didn't die while defending themselves during the cop-massacre, while slowly becoming aware of her “possession”. Honestly, this movie gets better and better at every turn... if your version of “better” involves fog machines and laser light shows.

Things to watch for: Epic fog-machine use at the flimsiest excuse; a cop that witnesses an attack against Christie, does nothing to help her as she fends off her attackers, and then “arrests” her for assault as a way to win her heart; the aforementioned wooing plot working; the grossest use of V-8 Juice in a sex seen; an arcade game scanning Christie with lasers, for a very long time, for no clear reason; the revelation that “only a ninja can kill a ninja”; attempts to jazzercise the ninja spirit away; a man who wears a sweater under all his tank tops... hold on, maybe that wasn't a sweater...

And Tape Freaks was born...

  Three-ish years ago, Tim and I ventured into a nondescript video store in Fridely MN to find the biggest, bad movie purgatory we will likely ever encounter outside of a collectors home. There, in the dusty entryway of a porn rental shop, we purchased right around 200 VHS tapes. In the next two weeks we would return a handful of times more; an obsession was born. And that obsession has spread to other aspects of film; we are now becoming 35mm Trailer Freaks as well. Stay tuned while we get our act together and post more regularly, also check out Trailer Trash if you are in the area!

A little while back, we helped make a trailer!

We would absolutely rate this movie Definitely Watchable...if it was ever to become a movie that is... Tim (the other half of Tape Freaks) wrote and produced the music. It was a fun project to work on, we even had real cops hold real guns on us! 

New Feature: What the hell are we watching?

Watching movies is easy! Finding the time to write reviews and video capture them... well that's another story. So we've decided to introduce a new feature to Tape Freaks: What the hell are we watching?

I'll take photos of movies we are watching, while we are watching them, and you guess what they are. What do you win you ask? Braggin' rights of course! 

The fun starts now:

We've got some friends over for a Start the Week Right movie night, know what we picked to watch?

Trash Film Debauchery: The Gun and the Pulpit

The next TFD flick playing at the Trylon microcinema sounds like it will start the summer off right! A 70s western staring Marjoe Gortner (former child minister) as a gunslinger assuming the identity of a gunned down priest in an effort to elude the men hunting him down. This is the second of three Marjoe movies TDF is screening this cycle at Trylon; keep May 22nd free for Starcrash as well!

The Gun and the Pulpit
Wednesday, April 24th, 7:00
Trylon
$5

Horror for the Holidays: Leprechaun

   Our friend over at MOA Theaters is programing some interesting stuff this year under the heading "Horror for the Holidays". The next holiday they're tackling is St. Patrick's day; the celebratory screening? Leprechaun! That's right, on March 14th you can see Leprechaun on the big screen for a measly 5 bucks! 
  
  There's nothing quite like watching a great horror movie in a room full with fans, especially when those fans have been plied with green beer from the theaters "Star Bar"!