Tim's Top Five Movies Right Now

Colette asked me to quickly list five of my favorite movies without thinking about it too much. Whenever I've made quick lists like that I inevitably forget whole genres or filmmakers that I love, but I end up with movies that I could put on at any moment and would be happy. Some of these movies I'll have on repeat while working on monsters or posters and therefor I've seen some of these many many times, and will likely see them many many times more! In no particular order:


Robocop (1987)

Hilarious and scary with fairly accurately depicts corporate shenanigans of present day and has one of the greatest bad guy teams in movie history, how could you not love Robocop? Clarence Boddicker and his crew engage in hilarious banter that could only be rivaled by Hans Gruber and his cronies, but every line of dialogue is great in this one. "Take a close look at the track record of this company. You'll see that we've gambled in markets usually regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals. Prisons. Space exploration. I say, good business is where you find it."



Evil Dead (1981)

I really do love Evil Dead 2, but there's something about the first one I really love. You can almost see how barely held together it is, but it's still engaging and believable. The stop motion weirdness, the creepy score and sound design, the so-cheesy-it's-creepy makeup effects, and all the awkward performances make this easy for me to watch again and again.



The Thing (1982)

Not unlike Evil Dead, the elements of this movie come together creating an extremely satisfying tone. Rob Bottin and his crew set the bar so high that people have used this as the universal bench march for creature effects, but that's not to say they over shadow the great characters, dialogue, cinematography and score of this classic.



Back to the Future

As with all of my picks there isn't a lot I can say about this one that hasn't been said already, but this is one of the very few movies I would consider to be perfect. Every aspect of this movie works and it remains enjoyable even after countless viewings. No matter how many times I see it, I'm still on the edge of my seat hoping Marty and Doc can pull it off!



Tremors

Like all these movies, I've watched Tremors too many times and I still never tire of it, but I think this one really boils down to the characters. The filmmakers really do an amazing job of making you actually care about these people, as well as making them people I'd be happy hanging out with. I also find myself quoting this movie all the time for absolutely no reason. "Broke in the wrong goddamn rec room didn't ya, you bastard!"




Bonus TV show!

Venture Bros or Mighty Boosh

 

Mighty Boosh is also in my heavy play rotation, but a new season of Venture Bros is definitely my most anticipated thing of any year (or however long). If you put a gun to my head and made me pick just one, I might end up dead...

Genre Mashing: Robo Vampire

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!