We've written about Dick Miller before but you really can't say enough about him. That's likely why Elijah Drenner made a documentary about him!
If you aren't familiar with Dick Miller by name, you most likely would recognize him from any of his 175 roles. He sells guns to the Terminator, he's the town drunk/snow plow driver in Gremlins, in the Howling he sells convenient books on werewolfs. He pops up in Pirannah, Chopping Mall, The 'Burbs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Innerspace, Matinee, Unlawful Entry, Small Solders, and he's got a (rare) starring role in A Bucket of Blood.
We seriously can't wait for That Guy Dick Miller so we can learn so much more about this iconic That Guy. But we only have to wait for Friday because Trylon is screening That Guy all weekend! Check it out and know so much more about a man you've seen in everything.
Thank you to everyone who stopped out last night, you were a fun crowd and many fun conversations were had!
If you didn't get there early enough to get one for free, Tim's posters will be up for sale in the next day or two. And as always, check back here to get clues about next month's movie!
Tonight!
Come join us for another night of cinematic weirdness. There'll be some trashy VHS trailers (pulled straight from our collection) and a genre mashing movie that will make you wonder so many things...
The first 20 people that arrive at the Starbar (starting at 6:30) will get a limited number screenprint poster designed and printed by Tim just for this event. Come get a free poster and chat with your fellow movie nerds!
Once upon a time, Hammer House of Horror and Shaw Brothers mashed together not only their production houses' talents, but eastern and western vampire lore, in a pretty unique martial arts movie. The only thing missing (sadly) is Christopher Lee, making this the only Hammer Dracula movie not featuring Lee as Dracula.
The plot unfolds something like this: Professor Van Helsing has traveled to China on his continuing quest to destroy all things vampire. While there, he meets a young man who's village is being tormented by seven golden-bat-medallion-wearing vampires. Together they journey to destroy the 7 Golden Vampires and their army of walking dead.
Things to watch for: The interesting takes on women and westerners that sometimes changes on a dime for some characters, strangely chosen makeup effects, a man being possessed by Dracula, and of course Peter Cushing.
A.K.A.: 7 Brothers and a Sister Meet Dracula
Things we learned: Run Run Shaw was alive until the 7th day of this year. He was 106 years old and had 329 producer credits under his belt.
Why did this interesting marriage happen?: During the end-times for Hammer, the studio head sold the company to his son who had some ideas on how to get audiences' faded interest back. Sadly those ideas didn't pay off and the studio eventually shut it's doors, but out of their death rattle came the Shaw Bros team ups for The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and Shatter (a more straight forward action move we've not yet seen).
Other strange Shaw Bros team ups: Shaw Bros, Roger Corman, and New World all joined up for the Cannonball Run precursor Cannonball, and Shaw Bros joined up with Warner Bros for Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold.
This is a fun genre mashup in the same vein as Botched, as it starts out as a crime-gone-wrong movie. The Cottage is more up-beat than Botched, but still manages to be pretty dang gory.
The plot starts out like this: David (Andy Serkis) has recruited his brother (Reece Shearsmith of League of Gentlemen)
to help him with a kidnaping-for-ransom scheme. It doesn't seem to take long for things to go belly up and spiral completely out of control. And that's when things get exponentially worse...
Things to watch for: Andy Serkis playing an angry bad guy, fun twists all the way through, inventive gore.
The next installment of Trailer Trash will be like no other! That's because this round of Trailer Trash will be exclusivly VHS content! We scoured our expansive VHS collection and captured the best of the worst, and on April 9th you can bask in the VHS trailer glory. (If you're curious about what we'll be screening, we'll be serving up a taste on March 26th before the super secret Tape Freaks movie!) Trailer Trash Vhs, Theaters @ MOA, April 9th, 7:30pm, $7.
Detention (2012) seems to be a love it or hate it movie. We love it, but it didn't start that way. We watched this with a friend one Halloween, and it got to the point that we all wanted to stop watching, but none of us wanted to ruin the movie for anyone else who might be enjoying it so we kept our mouths shut. Lucky we did because by the time it was over, we all wanted to watch it again!
Detention is a genre mash-up with no peers. There are subtle homages to just about every teen movie you can think of, but not many are so obvious that you can even place why they're familiar. And the sub-genres they cover are amazing: freaky-friday style body switch, time travel, coming of age, save the dance, misfits come together as friends, underdog saves the day, avant-garde, and slasher horror.
Main plot unfolds something like this: Riley Jones has awoken to yet another awful day in her high school life. Little does she know that this awful day will be punctuated by a copy cat serial killer who's basing their crime spree on a popular slasher film. Will Riley and her band of misfit friends be able to figure out what's going on and save their school before the big dance? And what's with that friggin' bear?
You might appreciate Detention if you ever liked any of the following (or just elements from the following): Rubber, Crank, Freaky Friday, Venture Bros., Breakfast Club, Saw, Back to the Future II, Better Off Dead, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Can't Hardly Wait, Heathers, Scream, or The Fly.
Things to watch for: Josh Hutcherson before The Hunger Games, breakneck twists and turns, more absurdity than you can shake a stick at (while remaining a movie with a heart and plot), a shockingly amazing score from Brain Mantia and Melissa Reese, and some top notch performances from the entire cast.
Other things directer Joseph Kahn has done lately: That amazing Power Rangers homage!
This is one of our favorite movies, so we are totally biased, but if any of that sounded interesting to you, check this one out! You might like it as much as we do...
If you've ever enjoyed a horror-comedy, haunting, or coming of age movie, Housebound will not let you down. Full of original ideas, fleshed out characters, and amazing twists and turns, this has quickly become one of our favorite movies to introduce to new viewers first hand.
The plot unfolds something like this: Kylie Bucknell has gotten herself arrested botching an ATM burglary and is sentenced to house arrest. While enduring her annoying mother and her "cabbage in a sweater" stepdad, she stumbles onto a decade old murder mystery that seemingly only she can solve.
Trope it is not: Though this movie draws on a classic set up, there is nothing classic about the execution.
Hollywood, Remake City: The remake is already in the works, but don't bother waiting for the US to ruin it for you, see the New Zealand version.
Reasons to watch: Amazing insults and reactions from every cast member, fantastic balance between creepy and funny, and amazing comedic timing.
A gem from the box art alone ----------------------------------------------------->
The sleeve and credits said one “Joe Livingstone”
directed this masterpiece, but a quick look on the IMDB told us it was actually Godfrey Ho, director of a-hundred-and-nineteen surely wonderful
movies including gems like Ninja Terminator, Robo-Kickboxer, Clash of the Ninjas and a few more we own but
haven't gotten around to watching yet.
Plot unfolds something like this: Some
crafty drug smugglers have decided to train vampires to guard their
drugs during transport. During an altercation with said vampires, a
narcotics agent gets himself killed and then brought right back to
life –by some questionable lab coated folks– to become a
robot-cop hell bent on defeating the drug lords and their vampires.
And if that isn't amazing enough:
There's a sub-plot that culminates in the wedding of a ghost and a
vampire.
Things to watch for: Basement-sale
budgets for everything, over the top run-on-sentence-exposition
overdubbing, and a robot costume that seems like it was a very generous gift from a high school theater
troup.
What we learned: This time
we learned an actual thing! This movie is what we'd always called a
“hopping vampire movie”, which we have now learned are called Jiang-shi. Behaving more like zombies than vampires, Jiang-shi
hop as their mode of transportation due to rigamortis setting into
their rotting corpses, they feed on qi (our life-force) rather than
blood, and can be stopped by everything from the blood of a black dog
to spilled rice.
Things you shouldn't care about: Every
single actor in this movie (as well as almost all of the crew) never
worked on a single other film, with two exceptions: Ernst Mausser (36
films) and Sorapong Chatree (57 films). Neither of those actors were even given credits in the original film!
This is one of those movies that's hard to talk about if you've not seen it. It's one best watched with no prior knowledge whatsoever. So, if you trust us, and you should, stop reading this and watch Botched right now! But if you need some further prodding, read on, but know even without spoilers, there are spoilers...
Plot starts out like this: Ritchie (Stephen Dorff) is having a string of bad luck. He's got one last chance to pay off a family debt to Russian mobsters by pulling a heist for them in a highrise in Moscow. The heist goes belly up when building security stops the elevator the thieves are riding on a floor of the building that's under renovation. And then shit gets seriously weird.
What to watch for: Plot twists you couldn't predict if you tried, fantastic casting, and loads of blood.
What we will tell you: This is the best heist-gone-wrong movie ever made.
