Well I’ve had my fun the past few weeks watching more well known films, so now it is time to get back to brass tachyons and rummage up some harder to find films. This week’s film is one of the first ecological doomsday film though rather then focusing on the science fiction aspect of the plot, it chooses to follow the newspaper men covering the story. Sounds like The Day the Earth Caught Fire is positively dripping with excitement, no?

I always had a soft spot for John Carpenter. As a kid, he was the first director whose name meant something to me. Seeing his name flash across the screen for the commercials for The Fog when I was a child left an impression that I’m still trying to shake off today. More than any other director, Carpenter appeared to be making movies just for me. Halloween and The Fog were there when I was first discovering horror movies. Escape from New York, The Thing and Starman arrived when I was exploring other genres. When I discovered Stephen King, Christine arrived at the video store. When I stumbled on martial arts movies, he gave me Big Trouble in Little China. When I became interested in science, Carpenter churned out the underrated Prince of Darkness (a pessimistic and claustrophobic End of Days story offset by the optimism of quantum physics). And when I started to question authority, along came They Live (a movie remembered more for its excess than its restraint). Looking at Carpenter’s work from The Fog (1980) to They Live (1988), not only is it an impressive resume, but it is a body of work that perfectly reflects the paranoia, glut and cynicism that was the Eighties.

Sadly, the Nineties would not be a good time for Carpenter, and this, like many of us, is when I started to lose interest in his work. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, while inventive at times, is painful and never quite understands what kind of movie it wants to be; all of this is made worse by the fact that many scenes practically scream studio intervention.

So when I saw the trailer for 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, I tried not to get my hopes too high. The good news was the movie ended up being pretty good, and the bad news was that it would be Carpenter’s last good movie. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn’t often that I get to force Anna to watch something she has no interest in. Typically I have to find some way of piquing her interest or there simply is no way she will go. Take Midnight Meat Train, for example. While she isn’t averse to gore or horror films by any means, trying to talk her into driving 20 minutes to one of the worst areas of town to watch a film that might be terrible wasn’t an easy task. But after informing her on the treatment the film was receiving from Lionsgate, she became interested enough to see if the movie really deserved to be stashed away in the far reaches of the metro area. Of course after watching it we both realized why the film isn’t getting a wide release, but you have to give her credit for making the effort. Read the rest of this entry »

Quick and easy entry this week as my choices are pretty close to universally awful. The obvious film to see this weekend is American Teen. This is an outstanding documentary on a group of Indiana High School seniors living out their last year of High School. It is a great little film that truly deserves a huge following. But being an Indie documentary it is probably bound to live in obscurity.

The other interesting film to watch is Midnight Meat Train, if you can find it. Suffering through multiple release delays and a change in directors (controversial Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura is now in charge) the film was slated for a direct-to-dvd release but is now getting some rather odd treatment by Lionsgate. They have now chosen to have a very small release for the film, 100 screens nationwide, and all of them will be on the secondary market. Meaning you will have to find your local dollar theater and hope they have it, because the odds of the film lasting more then a week are incredibly slim. Is the movie any good? Who knows? But the studio seems terrified of it so that has to account for something, right?

As for DVD releases, The Counterfeiters, the Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film finally gets a release. While not the best foreign film of last year, it is still a very good movie that is easily worth a rental. Which is more then I can say for Nim’s Island.

As always trailers are after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

Now I am probably one of the small handful of people who enjoyed Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. I was there opening night and saw it with a few friends and all of us liked it to varying degrees. Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly capable of admitting that there are major flaws with the film, and that those flaws make Book of Shadows a difficult film to appreciate on a surface level. And it was that bitter pill that ended up sinking a potentially fascinating franchise. But lurking beneath the surface were characteristics and themes that I wish more sequels would aspire to. Read the rest of this entry »