Dedicated to reviewing Cinematic Oddities, Exploitation Classics, Grindhouse Obscurities, Spaghetti Western Shoot-em-ups, Brutal Revenge Flicks, Direct to Video Gems, Italian Crime Movies, and anything else we find cool. http://www.dumbdistraction.com I absolutely love this Italian crime flick. Two theives (Telly Savalas and Franco Nero) hit the road after killing a jewler and stealing what they think is a fortune in jewels. Their escape is incredibly destructive: they drive through a funeral procession and destroy the deceased's casket, crash through the middle of a Italian bazaar, and hijack a car with a 13-year old kid named Lennox (Mark Lester) hiding in the back. The rest of the movie features the trio's attempt to escape from the cops. Savalas and Nero are, not surprisingly, macho-tastic in their roles. And even Lester ends up turning in an above-average performance as a kid with an unexpected dark streak. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/redneck.html When the mad geniuses at Mondo Macabro sent Dumb Distraction this two disc collection - promising "six hours of red hot Indian horror from the land of gods and monsters" - it went straight to the top of Micah's 'To Watch' pile. Featuring two horror movies from Bollywood's famed Ramsay family (the Indian equivalent of Britain's Hammer Studio), this DVD set is a great introduction to a world of cinema that most horror fans know nothing about. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bollywoodhorrordvd.html In this Duccio Tessari flick, Klaus Kinski and Giuliano Gemma play brothers who feud over stolen jewels and gorgeous Euro-babe Margaret Lee. Rita Hayworth - at the end of her career - plays their alcoholic mother, constantly hitting her sons up for cases of whiskey and dropping bon mots like "I haven't had a drink since this morning... that's probably why I'm blue" and "I like whiskey because it burns!." http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/thebastard.html In The Killer Likes Candy, US Special Agents Stone and Costa have to keep King Moah - ruler of the tiny South Asian nation of Kaphiristan - alive long enough to sell his country's petroleum rights to the US. But sweaty Italian and all-around bad guy Guardino has hired Oscar Snell, a candy-obsessed hitman, to take out the King. Guardino has also dispatched a crew of thugs - lead by a giant Swede named Govich - to kill Stone. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/killerlikescandy.html Here's a particuarly nasty slice of eurosleaze. Spanish cinema mainstay Assumpta Serna plays Adela, a passionate criminal defense lawyer. The movie opens with Adela making a closing argument in a murder trial, painting her murderous client as the true victim: "Imagine the horrid existence that would lead one human to kill another for a small sum of money." Not even the theft of her car or the murder of George, her husband, can shake her faith in humanity. But will her idealism hold out when her husband's killer, Mauri (Luis Hostalot), threatens Adela's children? http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/cotodecaza.html Idiocracy opens with a compelling argument that natural selection no longer favors the most intellegent of our species by comparing a genius yuppie couple who continually come up with valid reasons for putting off a family ("With the market the way it is right now, it just wouldn't make fiscal sense to have a child") with a redneck moron named Clevon who procreates at an alarming rate (when his wife announces she's pregnant again he slams his beer on the table and angrily yells "Another kid? I thought you were on the pill and shit."). And so, after the absolutely average Private Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) gets cryogenically frozen for 500 years, it makes perfect sense that he'd be the smartest man on the planet. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/idiocracy.html Jerry Lewis Telethon Baby! http://www.dumbdistraction.com Micah dips into the Dumb Distraction Archives and pulls out a 80's slasher double feature: Slumber Party Massacres 1 and 2. Now featuring more Crystal Bernard! http://www.dumbdistraction.com Micah's gathered all the best cinematic car chases in today's post. Mostly European. Mostly 70's. Of course. http://www.dumbdistraction.com This week's TMME pits Stuart Whitman against a room of angry transvestites (drag queens actually, but let's not split hairs). Watch for Whitman's brutal use of a curling iron. http://www.dumbdistraction.com I love the premise of this 1977 Don Siegel Cold War flick: The Ruskies decide they want to play nice with the US, so they kill off their 24 most diehard "avowed hard-line Stalinist" KGB agents. Unfortunately for us, they miss one: Nicolai Dalchimsky (Donald Pleasence). And he's headed to the US with the names of 54 Russian sleeper agents, all of whom can instantly be deployed on kamikaze missions. All it takes is a phone call from Dalchimsky and a few lines from a Robert Frost poem. They called it Operation: Telefon. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/telefon.html Complete with pictures! http://www.dumbdistraction.com/ We've all had those moments when we've said to ourselves... "Man... I'd love to watch Steven Seagal's Above the Law, but I have to leave for work in 4 minutes!" So you call in sick, but the boss asks you what you were sick with, and you say Seagal Fever, and he says some crap about how that's not a real disease, and the whole thing ends up with you unemployed? Well those days are a thing of the past, thanks to Dumb Distraction reader Will, and his uncanny abilty to edit any movie down to 4 minutes or less. Here's his take on the previously mentioned Above the Law. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/ Pinball Summer exists in that specific teen sex comedy fantasy universe... a universe where every day is the first day of summer vacation, adults exist only to scream "you damn kids," even the biggest losers have kickass hotrods, the Pabst Blue Ribbon and cheap weed never run out, and random white t-shirt car washes and banjo-scored car chases can and do break out at any moment. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/pinballsummer.html Made in Canada by Italian filmmakers, Blazing Magnums is an interesting blend of the Italian Polizia and Giallo genres. You've got the tough cops and the car chases of the Polizia movies, but you've also got a tight little who-done-it mystery, complete with multiple murder suspects, a blind girl, and killer's point-of-view shots traditionally found in Giallo films. The result? An amazingly well done film where Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman) comes to town to track down his sister's murderer. Saitta's a singleminded cop who doesn't let the little things like due process or personal rights come in the way of his search (do they even have personal rights in Canada?). Of course, before he's done he'll have to face a wall of silence from his sister's hippie friends, a horde of angry transvestites, and a car chase to end all car chases. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/blazingmagnums.html Joe Bob Briggs has called this chase scene one of the "most innovative chase sequences of all time." From 1969's Run Angel Run, directed by Jack Starrett and starring William Smith. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/ Brian's posted one final treatise regarding SoaP. Enjoy. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaday.html Brian turned it up to 11. That's 26 hours of Snakes on a Plane. That's insane. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaday.html And the Snakes on a Day is officially over. Sweet. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaday.html Brian has now seen Snakes on a Plane nine consecutive times. There's one final screening in the Snakes On A Day proper, but Brian's decided that he's gonna stick around for an additional bonus screening. Geez. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaday.html Brian just finished Snakes on a Plane for the 8th time, and seems to have gotten his second wind. Nobody tell him he's still got 6 or 7 hours to go. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaday.html A lot of people are going to see Snakes on a Plane this weekend. But few will see Snakes on a Plane as many times as our good friend Brian. He's one of the elite few brave/foolish enough to commit to watching Snakes on a Plane for 24 straight hours. That's right... it's Snakes on a Day. Join the insanity. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaday.html Wherein Micah reviews Snakes on a Plane. Do you need to know anything else? http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/snakesonaplane.html It's too bad that fanboy messageboards weren't around back in 1974, because if they had been, the made-for-TV movie Fer-de-Lance wouldn't have ended up with such a woefully-undescriptive title. Come on... Fer-de-Lance? Sounds like some artsy French flick about the endless struggle of the proletariat against bourgeois society. Nor would it have been saddled with the only marginally more explanatory alternate titles Death Dive and Operation Serpent. Hell no. With a movie like this you've gotta flat-out tell the audience what to expect. And what, you ask, should the audience expect from Fer-de-Lance? Four sweet, simple words: Snakes on a Submarine. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/ferdelance.html There's a finite number of plots in the "WWII Men on a Mission" genre. You have "Rescue The Hostage," "Get the Old Squad Back Together," "Oddball Heroes Save The Day," and "The Reluctant Loner Proves His Worth"... and that's about it. Inglorious Bastards (which means bastards that are more than glorious) takes elements from each of these with mixed results. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/ingloriousbastards.html 1977 is generally remembered as the year Annie Hall beat out Star Wars at the Oscars, the true story of that cinematic year was the sheer number of Nature-Strikes-Back movies that graced the theaters... in a single year we saw William Shatner fight tarantulas in Kingdom of the Spiders, Richard Harris battle a killer whale in Orca, Christopher George and Leslie Nielsen duke it out with the entire animal kingdom in Day of the Animals, and Suzanne Somers use her powerful thighs to take down a colony of antagonistic ants in It Happened at Lakewood Manor. But the best of the bunch may be The Pack... if only for the fact that it stars Joe Don Baker as a marine biologist who has to defend an entire island from a pack of rabid dogs. I can't tell you h how happy it makes me feel that I live in a world where that sentence accurately describes a movie's premise. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/thepack.html Raw Force, AKA Kung Fu Cannibals has a reputation among those who've seen it as a goofy no-nonsense action flick. And for good reason: in the film's 86-minute runtime, you've got crutch-fu, crossbow-fu, hatchet-fu, toilet-fu, zombie-fu, a guy named Schwartz drop kicking an escaping ninja through the window of a moving truck, and tons of nudity. Not to mention a 20-minute scene featuring one of cinema's all-time greatest parties. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/rawforce.html Good news for the MST-ies among us, Michael J. Nelson has launched Rifftrax, a website where you can download commentary tracks for mainstream Hollywood flicks that are written and performed by Mike himself. The site's slogan: "We don't make movies, we make fun of them!" tell you all you need to know about the new venture. Needless to say, I'm thrilled about the prospect of more MST3K-like goodness, especially if its going to be directed at blockbusters that MST3K never could have afforded the rights to. The first (and thus far, only) offering from Mr. Nelson is 1989's Roadhouse, a movie that I've somehow avoided seeing. Until now. I've already purchased the rifftrax (just $2), and I'll be headed to Blockbuster soon to rent Mr. Swayze's Opus. I'll let you know how it turns out, but until then, check it out yourself. The more we buy, the more frequently we'll get updates http://www.rifftrax.com/index.php Door to Door Maniac (also known as Five Minutes to Live) is one of those movies that I'm surprised isn't more well known. This Desperate Hours-style flick stars a pre-clean livin' Johnny Cash as a maddog hitman who holds a bank VP's wife hostage so that his partner Vic Tayback (Mel from Alice, in his first starring role) can rob the local bank. The plan is simple: Cash camps out at the VP's house, the VP helps Tayback steal $70K, and unless Cash gets a call from Tayback every five minutes, the wife gets killed. And until you've seen the Man in Black terrorize, humiliate, serenade, and abuse an innocent housewife for 60 minutes, you've missed one of cinema's great sleazebag performances. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/doortodoormaniac.html Hotheaded Ross Archer was a hard protagonist for me to side with. If the first few minutes of Revenge Is My Destiny, we see him (accidentally?) kill a woman in Vietnam and lose his eye. When he comes back home - eyepatch and all - and finds that his wife moved out of his houseboat, he tells her best friend (twice) that he's going to kill the bitch. Ross tracks her down and breaks into her new apartment, only to discover that she's been earning money dancing at a go-go club and posing for 'exotic' pictures. He gets pissed, threatens to kill her again - this time to her face - and storms out. So when the wife 'commits suicide' by jumping out her apartment window, I automatically assumed - even though he had a good alibi - that had Ross made good on his threats. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/revengeismydestiny.html When the livestock of a local farmer (Woody Strode) starts dropping dead, he can't figure out what's wrong. Luckily for him, spider expert Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) is passing through town. You know she's an expert because she knows facts like "Spiders aren't supposed to live in people's houses... they're supposed to live outside." Diane figures out that the animals have been dying from massive amounts of spider venom, a revalation that causes the farmer to exclaim "I guess that explains the spider hill." Yeah, I guess it does. Oh, and did I mention that Emmy- and Saturn-Award winning actor William 'Bill' 'Not Captain Kirk or TJ Hooker' Shatner stars as an oversexed cowboy doctor? http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/kingdomofthespiders.html Twenty-five years before directing direct-to-video sequels for franchises like Bring it On and American Pie, and twelve years before directing my favorite Pauly Shore movie, Son in Law, director Steve Rash made the oft-forgotten, but very ambitious comedy-of-errors, Under the Rainbow. The screwball WWII-era flick stars a post-Empire, pre-Jedi Carrie Fisher as a casting director/midget-wrangler for the Wizard of Oz and a post Foul Play/Caddyshack, pre-Vacation/Fletch Chevy Chase as a Secret Service agent for a European Duke. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/undertherainbow.html When Dr. Ken Kincade and family move into a rich white neighborhood, his neighbors are thrilled. That is, until the block welcoming party (lead by a woman we'll call Queen White Bitch) discovers that he and his wife aren't a white family's butler and maid. Things turn ugly after that, but Kincade refuses his wife's request that they move. His reason? Apparently he doesn't have the time because he's the research he's conducting in his basement laboratory is "of such tremendous significance that it will one day alter the course of human history." Now that's mad scientist talk if I've ever heard it. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise now... Kincade's working on a serum that will turn healthy black men into unstoppable supermen. Now if Kincade could only find a healthy black man... http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/abarblacksuperman.html For those of you who are Starz subscribers, check out their all-day marathon of comic-related movies this Sunday. The channel is hyping the prime-time screenings of Blade Trinity and Sin City, but since I own both of those on DVD, I'm looking forward to the early-morning double-feature of Tank Girl (fun movie) and Nick Fury: Agent of Shield (a late-90's TV movie starring David Hasselhoff... I had no idea this movie existed!). And for the masochists out there, have fun trying to sit through the Judge Dredd/Steel double header. I AM THE LAUWWW! http://www.dumbdistraction.com Detectives/private eyes/secret agents generally come in one of two flavors: the super confident infallible James Bond type, or the loveable schmuck who blindly stumbles around until he manages to solve the mystery (think Cody Abilene from Malibu Express.) What makes Harry Clegg such an odd PI is that he manages to simultaneously fall into both camps. On one hand he's got a nice suit, he's supremely confident in his sleuthing skills, and he's always got a naked chick wondering around his apartment. On the other, he can't scrape together enough cash to have his shoes cobbled, he screams like a girl when he gets beat up, and his clients keep dying before they can pay him. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/clegg.html Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare may not be the only movie to use a "Struggling Band Goes to the Country To Practice But Gets Interrupted By Demonic Monsters" plot (Slumber Party Massacre II came out the same year with a nearly identical storyline) but it stands head and shoulders above the rest. From the introductory death by demonic oven to the climactic heavy-metal battle, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare belongs on this year's short list of must-own DVDs. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/rocknrollnightmare.html This rarely-seen slice of Filipino exploitation is a real gem. Back in the 80's the Philippine Islands were churning out movie after movie to satisfy local audience demand. Twenty years later a lot of these movies remain undiscovered by even the most hardcore North American movie-watchers. Because Filipino audiences were generally more interested in seeing non-stop action - often at the expense of all but the barest plot and character development - and because Filipino directors were able to procure extras and explosives cheaply and easily, these movies satisfy the deep primal urge to see shit get blowed up real good. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/wiswar.html Writer/Director Robert F. Slatzer's 1970's oddity Bigfoot is the only movie I'm aware of in the elusive Bigfoot vs. Biker Gang subgenre. That combination of two popular exploitation themes seems like a no-brainer, and given the fact that the movie boasts a couple of decently-hot 70's chicks and several experienced actors, you'd think Bigfoot would knock 'em out of the park. Hell, the movie doesn't even settle for giving you just one Bigfoot... you get an entire Bigfoot clan! Unfortunately, Slatzer's film drags to a complete standstill almost from the get-go, and never manages to gain any momentum. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bigfoot.html The DVD calendar is finally picking up, so there's plenty of new DVDs to get this month. I'm trying something new time time around... in addition to the regular DVD picks, I'm also including an Exploitation DVD Release Date Calendar. Let me know if you've got any thoughts on the new format. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/POM/micah06-06.html When Sugar Beaumont (Phyllis Davis) gets busted in Mexico on a bogus drug charge, she has three choices: rot in jail while waiting for a trial that may or may not take place, 'work off' her crime for the sleazy DA, or toil away in creepy Dr. John's (Angus Duncan) sugarcane fields for two years. Sugar picks the latter, and we get 90 minutes of pure women-in-prison bliss, mixed with a great Mad Doctor subplot and finished with a perfunctory splash of blaxploitation. Filmed in the Phillipines, Sweet Sugar is a virtually unknown WIP flick that I'd pit against any of Pam Grier's jail-based movies. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/sweetsugar.html Emanuelle Around the World is one of the more obscure entries in the so-called Black Emanuelle series. For those not familiar with these movies, they began as attempts to cash in on the popularity of the grindhouse favorite Emmanuelle (1974). Starring the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Indonesian Laura Gemser as a globe-travelling photographer/reporter named Emanuelle, these films ended up surpassing the popularity of their namesake. 1977 was perhaps the peak of the series' popularity, with Gemser starring in four different Black Emanuelle flicks (Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Emanuelle Around the World, Sister Emanuelle, Emanuelle in America). http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/emanuellearoundtheworld.html Revenge of the Cheerleaders is a lightweight teen sex comedy built around your standard greedly land developer plot. Walter Hartlander (William Bramley), President of the School Board (and wanna-be land magnate) wants to get Aloha High School closed down so that he can buy the land and open the Park and Lark Shopping Center. His plan - in true dumb teen comedy fashion - somehow depends on getting the school's cheerleaders suspended so that the basketball team will lose the big game against their crosstown rivals. If that plan doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry... there's plenty of faux-teenage nudity tossed in, courtesy of five nubile actresses... and David Hasselhoff. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/revengeofthecheerleaders.html Hope you're enjoying your three-day weekend with a stack of movies and a coolerful of the beverage of your choice. The image above comes, of course, from early-90's Pauly Shore comedy In the Army Now, a movie I loved growing up. I'm not sure what it was about that movie that enjoyed so much, but I vividly remember going to see it with a buddy of mine 3 times during opening weekend - twice on a Friday night, and once again the next afternoon. I'm tempted to re-watch it this weekend, but something tells me it one of those movies that's better left as a childhood memory. That movie - along with Kelsey Grammer's Down Periscope - always made military life seem oddly attractive. I've got some movies to watch now, so I'll leave you with Disney's Der Führer's Face, a 1943 propaganda movie where Donald Duck becomes a Nazi. Great stuff. http://www.dumbdistraction.com Darker Than Amber is the only cinematic adaptation of the Travis McGee pulp novels written by John D. MacDonald. (McGee also made an appearance on the small screen in 1983's The Empty Copper Sea.) MacDonald wrote over 21 novels starring McGee in a 20 year period (1964 to 1984), cashing in on the never-ending demand for stories about tough guys, crazy villains, and hot chicks. McGee - played here by Rod Taylor - is a Florida-based self-professed salvage consultant who, for a 50% finder's fee, will find anything you've lost. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/darkerthanamber.html Poor Pretty Eddie may not be my all-time favorite hicksploitation movie - that distinction belongs to Snakes (1974) - but it's a close second. Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams) is a popular R&B singer who gets stranded in the the middle of the woods when her car breaks down, and is forced to rent a room at Bertha's Oasis, an isolated motel run by an crazed redneck Elvis wannabe named Eddie (Michael Christian) and his sometimes lover, Bertha (a sleazily fantastic Shelley Winters). Also on hand is hulking handyman Keno (Ted "Lurch" Cassidy), good ol' boy sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens), and his borderline retarded slingshot-obsessed son Odell (Lou Joffred). And then there's an appearance by Dub Taylor as a J.P.(!) named Floyd that ranks up there as one of his best performances. Slim and Dub in the same hicksploitation movie? That damn-near sells itself. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/poorprettyeddie.html A few weeks ago the wall-sized mirror in my home bathroom decided to spontaneously shatter, revealing old wallpaper and a good-sized hole in the sheetrock where (I assume) a medicine cabinet used to sit. My wife asked if I had anything big enough to cover the hole, and it took about .23 seconds before I had my answer. Hell yes... http://www.dumbdistraction.com Inferno is a suspenseful, tightly-told revenge flick that - apart from the almost complete lack of violence - is exactly the kind of movie Tarantino would have made if he'd been born 40 years earlier. Robert Ryan stars as Donald Whitley Carson III, a spoiled, alcoholic millionaire who breaks his leg while horseback riding in the desert and is left to die a slow, agonizing death by his greedy wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover of three days(!), Joseph (William Lundigan). Geraldine and Joseph naturally assume that Carson, who's never worked a day in his life, will die of exposure or thirst in a matter of days. But Carson, fueled by the thought of vengeance, begins a hate-fueled, one-legged trek across the desert, vowing to make Geraldine and Joseph pay for their acts. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/inferno.html Just a quick update to let you know that the Dumb Distraction Reviews Index has been updated to show the last dozen or so reviews posted on this site (not counting festival coverage of SXSW and The Best of QT Fest). For those have haven't noticed (and there seem to be a lot), you can always get to the Reviews Index by clicking the REVIEWS button in the top navagation bar. To make things easier for those of you who want to browse around, I've added a icon to indicate the most recent reviews. Click away! http://www.dumbdistraction.com/reviews.html 99 44/100% Dead starts off with a 4-color comic book/pop art title sequence, overlayed with a jazzy Henry Mancini score, then a quick cut to two black-suited thugs tossing a man with cement boots off the end of a pier. The dead man sinks into the water, and the camera pans over the above-mentioned underwater graveyard, filled with all types of mob accoutrements - rusted out slot machines, liquor signs, and dozens of dead bodies in various stages of decomposition (including a skeleton tied to a wheelchair with a cast on one leg reading "Get Well Soon.") Suddenly, a 'down-home narrator' (think Roger Miller's narration from Disney's Robin Hood) starts talking about life on the East Side while a lazy swingtime song with a whistling chorus plays in the background. It'd be downright cheery if the narrator weren't saying things like "The fish here like to nibble on the fleshy parts of the corpses." http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/99percentdead.html Sorry for the lack of updates this week here at Dumb Distraction... I've been taking an early summer vacation, and haven't had much chance to post reviews. But that all ends tomorrow, because I've got some great stuff lined up for this week. To tide you over, here's a couple of clips of Commander USA, the great 80's horror host. I used to love this guy... and later on, USA Up All Night's Rhonda Shear. I'd love to see the rise of another great nationwide movie host... that Dinner and a Movie stuff just doesn't cut it. I want a middle-aged guy who'll dress up like a superhero and say stuff like That's my nom de plooma! Anyway, the first clip is even timely themed for Mother's Day, so enjoy, and check back Sunday for more reviews. http://www.dumbdistraction.com I'm still trying to get caught up on the mountain of stuff that piled up while I was geeking out at last week's Best of Quentin Tarantino Fest, but this bit of news seemed worth sharing. Eidos will be releasing a videogame version of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs later this year on XBOX and PS2 (and PC for you non-console gamers). The game will allow you to follow "the progress of the planned diamond heist through any one of the main characters, accompanied by the film's original soundtrack." Sounds pretty sweet to me... wish I'd known about it 5 days ago when I'dve had the chance to ask QT about it. Ah well, we'll know more on May 10, when Michael Madsen unveils the game at E3. http://www.dumbdistraction.com A bunch of QT Festival regulars decided to start the night off by grabbing the all-you-can-eat BBQ buffet at the Saltlick, an Austin favorite. The wisdom of eating 3 pounds of beef before sitting in a theater for 12 hours is questionable, but there's no denying how good the BBQ was. If you'd been within earshot of the table you would have been memserized by the level of geekiness eminating from our twelve-top... the film discussion was there, obviously, as were fevered conversations about the problems that WWE is currently experiencing and passionate debates about Marvel's Ultimates series. I love being a geek! http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest6.html After the all-night Horrorthon, I managed to catch about 6 hours of mid-day sleep on Brian's couch, then woke up and rushed back down for the seventh and final day of the Best of the QT Fest. Tonight - along with Tuesday's Biker Night, and I guess yesterday's Horrorthon - is the only officially themed night. And boy, was it a good one. No better way to end a week-long exploitation marathon than with a good, old-fashioned sexploitation double feature. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest7.html We have officially passed the halfway point at the Best of the QT Fest. Tonight's line-up was the night I was looking forward to the least (well, not Rolling Thunder... that's one of the one's I've been really psyched about). But hell, even a bad night at a QT fest is better than a good day at a multi-plex. And, it turned out that the two movies I was worred about, Billy Jack and Vanishing Point, actually ended up be cool in their own way. I should learn not to doubt the master. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest5.html Back again for another night at the Alamo Drafthouse, for what was officialy billed as a double-feature (but which anyone who spent anytime online knew would actually be a triple feature). It was, for the most part, another very solid night. It seems as if each day of the festival is building on the previous day's kick-assness, to create a steaming, smoldering ball of cinematic coolness. Will the ball keep rolling, gaining speed throughout the festival? Or will tomorrow night's back-to-back screenings of Billy Jack and The Vanishing Point create a towering wall of anti-cool that'll violently stop our poorly constructed analogy? Well I guess we'll have to see, won't we? But for now... the films! http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest4.html Today was the first triple feature day in the Festival... actually, that's not completely true. The QT Fest Officially had 2 films, Wipeout and Brotherhood of Death, followed by the Drafthouse's weekly series Weird Wednesday. Easily the best of the three days so far, in my book. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest3.html So the big question for day 2 of the Best of QT Fest was whether the screening was going to be outdoors at the Glenn as originally planned, or if rainy weather was going to force us indoors to the Alamo South Lamar. I say force, but halfway though tonight's opening film I was praying to be indoors. AFS either has a genius meteorologist on staff or took a damn lucky guess, because we ended up at the Glenn, even though everyone and their dog thought it was going to rain tonight. Austin Film Society - We Make Movies, Watch Movies, and Predict the Weather. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest2.html Today was the first day of the Best of Quentin Tarantino Festival. It was good being back in Austin and seeing all the friends I'd met at earlier festivals and movie-binges. There's nowhere quite on Earth to watch movies like the Alamo Drafthouse. I've been looking forward to this week for months, and can hardly believe that it's actually here. Dumb Distraction is your source for daily reviews of this one-of-a-kind festival. If you can't be here, I'll do my best to make this the next best thing. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/bestofqtfest1.html My favorite movie genre is 70's hicksploitation, and Psycho From Texas is a damn fine example of what's so great about those movies (ignore the fact that it was released in '82... this thing is pure southern-fried gold). The titular psycho is Wheeler (John King III) - a cocky criminal redneck with a Prince-Valiant haircut, skin-tight blue jeans, and a tendancy to punctuate his speech with random out-of-place bursts of laughter. Throughout the entire movie, King gives one unforgettable line reading after another. Like William Sanderson in Fight for Your Life, it's something you really have to hear to appreciate. Wheeler is hired to kidnap Bill Phillips - a rich oilman - with the idea being that he will hold him hostage for a few days, then release him for a huge ransom. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/psychofromtexas.html The Black Angels was described to me as "the Biker movie where they keep a lion and there's a song about eating cigarettes." If you're like me, that's more than enough to peak your interest. But since we're all here, I'll go ahead and expand on that summary. In Black Angels, the white biker gang - led by Chainer (Des Roberts) - and the black biker gang - led by Knifer (Robert Johnson) - have an uneasy alliance, marred by the occassional outburst of violence. Both gangs get hassled by the Black Angels... the local cops, led by Lt. Harper. Harper wants both gangs gone, and he's come up with a scheme to trick the gangs into wiping each other out. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/blackangels.html Director Al Adamson was behind a lot of great exploitation movies in the 70's: Jim Kelly's Black Samurai, sexploitation comedies like Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses, the sleazy I Spit on Your Corpse! and my personal favorite, Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (a movie that features less than a minute of the titular fight). Black Heat was one of his attempts at making a blaxploitation movie, and for the most part, it's a pretty alright movie. It stars Timothy Brown as Kicks Carter, a kickass cop trying to shut down a massive coke-for-guns deal in the means streets of... somewhere. I guess I wasn't paying attention. But hey, the title sequence promises to "introduce J.C. Wells as Guido," and that's all that matters. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/blackheat.html There's a Half Price Books near my house that has an absolutely enormous collection of records. Most of the records are sorted, but there's also usually several boxes full of recent additions that they haven't had time to put into bins. Those are the ones I like to dig through when I get the chance. I just got back from rummaging through several new boxes, and it was a pretty good run, including a half-dozen original Smothers Brothers LP and the record pictured above, the 1965 Thunderball soundtrack. Tom Jones does James Bond baby. It was $2.98, and the record looks like its never been played. I'm trying to decide if I want to put it in a frame and hang it in my media room or keep it out so I can listen to. The art is so damn great. Although... on closer inspection, what is that scuba diver doing to 007? http://www.dumbdistraction.com/ I love movies like Candy Snatchers, because it reminds me just how vulnerable we are all, despite living in a 'civilized' society. We just kinda trust everyone around us to follow the rules, and when someone doesn't we're really caught with our pants down. The German movie Funny Games is kinda like that too. In this movie, one minute Candy's a regular teenage girl walking home from school. Ten minutes later she's been grabbed by a trio of Groucho-Marx Nose-'n'-Glasses wearing kidnappers, dragged out into the desert, and buried alive in a makeshift coffin with only a tiny airhole to keep her alive. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/candysnatchers.html OK folks, courtesy of the Drafthouse, here's the films that have been announced for the Quentin Tarantino festival, along with my thoughts and ramblings. Of course, you can count on some last-minute programming changes, but here's what we've got so far. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/bestofqtfestschedule.html ...And for those of you who started reading Dumb Distraction fairly recently, you may enjoy checking out my coverage of the last Tarantino festival. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/qt6.html Good news all... this morning Micah and Brian both scored coveted passes to the Best of Quentin Tarantino festival, to be held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin April 24-30. If you've never heard of the festival, its basically an excuse to get together with 200 other film geeks and let Taranino show you films from his personal collection that he loves... films that inspired his movies... films that are fantastic but have never been released on any home video format, ever. He intros each movie, telling you what's good about them, and believe me, his intros can make even an average movie seem like a classic. Tickets for this event started selling over the phone at 8AM, and were expected to sell out within minutes. Luckily Micah got through just on the button, so those of you that can't go can at least look forward to a full report of the festival here at Dumb Distraction, just like last year. Come back in 20 days for reviews, QT intros, and hopefully, a few Nicky Katt stories. http://www.dumbdistraction.com Seems like I've been saying this since December, man... this month is slim-pickin's as far as DVD releases go. You'd think they'd run out of movies to release or something. Its so bad that my Pick of the Month has already been released on DVD. Well, let's see what May brings. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/POM/micah04-06.html Deadtime Stories is a mid-80's horror anthology that uses a drunken uncle's bedtime stories to his annoying nephew as the framework for telling three twisted fairy tales. Each story gets progressively better, and the Uncle/Nephew story is somewhat entertaining. Directed by the guy who brought us 1983's Stuck On You!, Deadtime Stories has brief moments of brilliance surrounded by the typical 80's horror schlock. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/deadtimestories.html Anybody else noticed the incredibly annoying Kong DVD 'advertisement' on IMDB today? As soon as you get to their search page, Kong himself pops out and shakes the Search box around for several seconds, during which, you can't do anything but stare and wait. I use IMDB several times a day, and am used to searching as soon as the box appears. And I know that 3-5 seconds isn't a long time to wait, and I know that there are ways to get around it, but still... something about the ad just rubs me the wrong way. Of course, I've just spent a paragraph talking about Kong when I wouldn't have otherwise, so I guess I'm the sucker. http://dumbdistraction.com/Images/kongad.jpg In The Asphyx - a British horror film set in the 1800's - scientist Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens) inadvertently discovers that photographs taken the instant before a person's death reveal a black smudge near the body. When Hugo finds the same black smudge on a video recording he made of his son's boating-accident death, he theorizes that the smudge is actually a person's Asphyx... their Spirit of the Dead... coming to claim their soul. Hugo makes a second discovery when he videotapes a public execution... his camera's phosphorus-based spotlight can physically trap the Asphyx and prevent it from taking the soul. Of course, this is actually a curse for the condemned man, who swings and twitches at the end of the hangman's noose until Hugo turns off the spotlight and allows the Asphyx to do its job. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/theasphyx.html Dumb Distraction joins the millions worldwide in expressing our condolences to the family of Richard Fleischer, a fantastic and prolific director who died yesterday afternoon. Richard will be remembered by the masses for timeless films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Soylent Green, but here at Dumb Distraction we'll remember Mr. Fleischer as the force behind the lesser-known slavesploitation flick Mandingo (1975) and his Charles Bronson vehicle Mr. Majestyk (1974). Fleischer has left behind a body of amazing work, and will be truly missed. http://www.dumbdistraction.com In this little-seen giallo, Simona (Mimsy Farmer, Code Name: Wild Geese, Two Men in Town) is a medical student who works in the local morgue to make ends meet while she finishes her thesis on the difference between authentic and simulated suicide. Her troubles begin when she starts to suspect that a recent rash of violent suicides in her small Italian village may actually be homicides... and that the killings may or may not have something to do with her mob boss father. As if that weren't enough, its altogether likely that Simona is going crazy... and as a result, the viewer is never quite sure if what we're seeing is real or a product of Simona's psychosis. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/autopsy.html In this Italian Crime Film from director Stelvio Massi, Maurizio Merli is Wally, a down-on-his-luck private eye. When Wally recieves a letter from a concerned father about the man's missing daughter, Wally flies to Austria to see if he can track her down. When he gets there, he finds himself holster-deep in several seemingly unconnected acts of violence, including goons with bowling balls, forced child prostitution, corrupt cops, and Joan Collins as a stripper. Can he unravel the mystery behind these events before it's too late? http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/fearlessfuzz.html When this one showed up from Netflix, it took me a while to figure out why I'd put it in my queue. Laserblast is a late-70's kids movie about loser kid named Billy (Kim Milford, the poor-man's Mark Hamill), who finds an extra-terrestrial gun that a couple of aliens left in the desert. The gun gives Billy the chance to get revenge on the people who make fun of him - a group which includes a senile old man, two local cops, and a nerd (Eddie Deezen) who went on to voice one of the Rice Krispies elves. Too bad for Billy the gun can only be used by putting on a magical necklace which changes its wearer into a crazed zombie-esque mutant. http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/laserblast.html On Day Five of SXSW '06, Micah checks out 51 Birch Street, PATRIOT ACT: A Jeffrey Ross Home Movie, and Hard Candy, an eclectic trio of films to say the least... http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/sxsw06-5.html On Day Four of SXSW '06, Micah watches Live Free or Die, Summercamp!, LOL, The Oh in Ohio, Bickford Shmeckler's Cool Ideas, and Population 436. He really liked one of the films (hint: it's not Population 436) and really hated another (hint: it is)... http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/sxsw06-4.html On Day Two, Micah watches Jam, Gretchen, Fired!, Air Guitar Nation, The Lost, and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. One of these movies bombed and one is his current 'Pick of the Festival'... http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/sxsw06-3.html Micah gets in his first day of films at SXSW, watching Bondage, Live Free or Die, Maxed Out, Darkon, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and This Film is Not Yet Rated... http://www.dumbdistraction.com/Reviews/sxsw06-2.html