The Comic Critic Reviews "Little Dead Rotting Hood"

I’m sure the title of Little Dead Rotting Hood was meant to appeal to the zombie-loving crowd as well as trying to spin the folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood in a new direction. I know that’s what lured this fish to take the hook. The first five minutes of Little Dead Riding Hood told me that I was set for a world of boredom and disappointment. Be warned, you will need to keep yourself alert; otherwise, you will find yourself yawning through the crucial few minutes of exposition that actually explains what is meant to be going on. As is often the case with a gimmick-titled movie, Little Dead Rotting Hood lacks substance. If you want to see a great horror film with a Red Riding Hood spin, I suggest you watch The Company of Wolves (1984). If you want a straight-to-tape zombie movie that at least won’t bore you to tears, I suggest The Video Dead (1986). Which just goes to show that practical special effects from decades ago can still beat the pants off bad editing and CGI.

The Comic Critic Reviews "GOG"

It’s important to remember that GOG was released in 1954, three years before Sputnik would orbit the planet. At the time, it was seen as yet another novelty movie to feature 3D special effects. As a science fiction film it tried to capture and show ideas that were foreign. And while the terminology used in the film didn’t make its way into common use, the concepts shown did come to fruition: Solar Power Stations, Solar Powered Space Stations, A Space Race, even Wi-Fi. The problem with GOG is that a ton of the “High-Tech” in the movie was shown in such an extremely hokie manner that GOG came across as silly. The ample amounts of boring stock footage didn’t help. If done better, maybe the message of the upcoming space race would have touched the audience. As it was, it was not this movie, but Sputnik flying over the heads of Americans that caused an immediate shift in our society to fast-track math and science education in public schools. Now with computers in our pockets and little kids launching satellites into space as classroom projects, GOG is nothing more than a slightly boring film, laughable for its cigarette-smoking mindset and absurdities. Just why would a top-secret underground installation have not just one, but two flamethrowers?

Do you want a sneak peak?

The Comic Critic Reviews Maniac from 1934

You might be thinking that I’ve reviewed Maniac already. Well, I did review a Grindhouse classic from 1980 by the same name, but this Maniac is a black-and-white exploitation film from 1934. Being independently produced, this Maniac was not chained to the Hays Code standards to which the studios were enslaved. It also lacked the studios’ wealth of talent. Some of the actors didn’t receive screen credit.  Others were gathered from the vaudeville circuit and apparently realized a chance for an oversized performance on film. Maniac is extremely weird. You can see it as either humorously bad on an epic scale, or as a brilliant work surreally delivered. It seems at times to diagnose itself as schizophrenic. Following the premise of Maniac is like trying to follow a bean in a carnival shell trick. I finally settled on the definition, “It’s so bizarrely awful, it’s entertaining.” And you have to wonder if an independent sex exploitation film from the ‘30s can pass the Bechdel Test, what’s keeping modern Hollywood from reaching the same high bar?

The Bechdel Test

1   1.     Has to have at least two women.

2   2.     Who talk to each other.

3   3.     About something other than a man.

I promised you photos from the pumpkin carving contest last week. Here they are:













And below is my pumpkin.
 
And how it looks at night.
 

The Comic Critic Reviews Matango aka: The Attack of the Mushroom People

I can’t help but wonder if Matango inspired Gilligan’s Island. You have a small crew of people with different roles in society cruising the high sea for jollies when a storm comes up and shipwrecks them. In Matango, the island on which they are shipwrecked has barely anything edible on it. Most of the movie is spent revealing the various crew members’ truly cruel and selfish natures as they struggle to survive starvation. It’s a dark and uneasy story compared to the kindhearted Gilligan’s Island, where everybody cheerily works together on their island rich in its bounty: bananas and coconut radios. It’s Matango‘s dark, brooding atmosphere that makes it so creepy. And also creepy is that the mushrooms’ poisonous nature is known, but never truly accepted (except towards the end of the movie). The mushrooms are more than an obvious physical metaphor on human society. Or maybe it’s the evil of peer pressure. Or it might be a bit of both.

Tonight I will be participating in a Pumpkin Carving Contest hosted by the CLAW. I'll be sure to post photos of the various pumpkins later.

B-Movie Poster from The CLAW's Open Swim

Once a month The CLAW gets together for an Open Swim were we sit down and draw based on a theme. The theme this month was B-Movies you wish existed. You had just over an hour to draw a poster and then do a one minute movie pitch. Here was my contribution.

She was a Latin Major with a classic 50s look visiting the aquarium in search of the meaning Achteuthis Dux, he was an alien invader assigned to probe and invade Earth, but when their eyes met through the 3 inch reinforced plexiglass they knew that their love was… a queasy internet fetish made possible by a loophole in Japanese pornography laws about an ancient freaky myth.