Category Archives: Review

Movie, Review, Zombies

Hard Rock Zombies (1985)

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I like bad film… but not this bad.  Hard Rock Zombies is rated dark Red Blood and is the film that inspired me to start my list of Zombie Films Avoid.

I picked up a copy of Hard Rock Zombies a handful of years back while in a liquidation store for maybe $5.  It was on a DVD that had 3 zombie films — Night of the Living Dead, Hard Rock Zombies, and another title I can’t remember right now. Out of the three films, this one is such a POS that I think the other two films each cost half of the total  price and HRZ was thrown in for free — because this is the only way the folks who produced this film could get anyone to take a copy home.

Watching this film I get the impression that the producers and crew and the whole lot behind the film normally produce and shoot 1980s porn films.  In this case they got together outside of their usual work to do something different, or maybe they were trying to get a foothold in another part of the film industry other than porn.

The audio is bad, the songs are bad, the love affair between the lead-singer of the band and the local girl who seems underage clearly verges on having a pedophile element … maybe the only good thing about this is the outrageousness that someone thought to have a zombie film that included Hitler and Nazis.

BOTTOM LINE
Do Not Waste Your Time With This Film

I like bad film but this was so much of a train-wreck that I could only stand to watch it in 10-15 minute intervals.  It’s not one of those “It’s so bad it’s good” things — NO — it’s just outright BAD!

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Movie, Review, Zombies

Day of the Dead (2008)

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This Day Of The Dead remake of George A. Romero’s original 1985 film could be a called a cross between 28 Days Later and the 2009 version of The Crazies. From the start the action ramps up, and 30 minutes in it stays constant — intense gore-fest. The zombies are high speed, a bit super-human, and the humans consist of recognizable actors beginning their careers — all with no gratuitous displays of possibly-future-famous-breasts (they’re nice, but it just gets old in zombie films). This piece showed me a few new things to z-films, and the story-line didn’t particularly take any leaps, however I did have a few beefs…

I thought it odd that upon the point an infected human turns into a zombie that they instantly fester sores and rotted skin.

I might be okay with the zombies having slightly super-human strength, but a Spiderman-like ability to stick to walls/ceilings was a over the top — if they’re going to do that, I would have preferred to see that they had the strength to dig their fingers in and hold-on.

Toward the end two survivors who where military broke into a civilian firearms store — there are a few problems with this…..

Usually gun stores are highly secure, you don’t just push the door open

I would have preferred that the film made the weapons realistic.  Civilian versions of military style weapons are only available in semi-automatic, not full-auto (semi-auto: you pull the trigger and the gun fires once, commonly &/or intentionally incorrectly called an ‘assault weapon’ / full-auto: the weapon continues to fire as long as you hold the trigger AKA a machine gun).

Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, I rate the remake of Day Of The Dead as Green Ooze and it was formerly on my Top 10 list.

How do you know your zombie film is cool? It features Ving Rhames!

Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSjJZCiQN-M

Movie, Review, Zombies

The Crazies (1973)

The poster is arguably cooler than the film.

(Written part way through viewing the film…) The Crazies (1973) is probably at least a 1/2 decent film but it doesn’t adequately hold my attention. After rating it Red Blood I should probably watch it again sometime when I’m sitting still — I’d like to see how it influences the 2009 version of the film. This film looks like it was made in the 1970s — oh yeah, because it was! The look of it, the story telling, the fashions — everything — all of which just adds to the campiness of it. (Written after viewing the film) The film seemed to end without a point — which isn’t to say that it didn’t have one, its more that it generally didn’t hold my attention well enough to notice one — all of a sudden a guy stripped, got lifted out of the danger zone, and the credits started rolling amid some paltry excuse for a 70s-ballad style song.

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Movie, Review, Zombies

The Crazies (2010)

The Crazies (2010) is rated Green Ooze and is one of BagpiperDon’s Favourite Zombie Movies.

I quite liked this flick — enough so that I believe I’d like to own a copy. It showed me some new stuff for a zombie film — largely with the ground-level very survivor-perspective of people in a situation trying to sort out whats going/gone on and what to do and the confusion that would come with that (much like 28 Days Later).

While it kind of had the typical zombie-film journey-theme (a group of humans decided that if they can travel from Point A they’ll be able to survive better at Point B), the main charactres didn’t as-much seem to know where they were going. My understanding is that the film had a limited budget, but the cast/crew did a good job making it look like it had some money behind the production.

The Crazies (2010) at IMDB

 

For Every Musician, Movie, Review

Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

Written 10Oct2016 – 28Oct2016

“Searching for Sugar Man” is the unbelievable-but-true story of an iconic musician who did not know he was famous.  While the artist’s music was influential, he seemed to have never existed.

Yeah – you read that right.

This story begins in Detroit, 1968 …

One night in 1968 Detroit, two renowned producers — Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey — intentionally went to a back-alley bar.  They wanted to hear a rumored musician known as Sixto Rodriguez.  He played and they listened.  So impressed with his craft, they quickly offered him a recording deal.  To their surprise, when his first albums were released in 1970 and 71 … they tanked!

As the singer / songwriter faded into obscurity, bootleg recordings of Sixto Rodriguez’s album found their way around apartheid South Africa. Here, unbeknownst to him, over the following two decades his music became a cultural phenomenon — but no one knew who the artist was…

“Searching for Sugar Man” gives the account of two Cape Town fans in the late 1990s endeavoring to solve the mysteries surrounding their hero.

LINKS

NOTE – Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore also worked with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Supremes, Gladys Knight, Ringo Starr, The Four Tops, and Wilson Pickett, among others.  Yeah, these guys are no joke.  Also, this film does not draw attention to the fact that Sixto Rodriguez did get attention in Australia.  The film receives some criticism for this, suggesting that it is ‘myth building’.  The argument against the criticism is that the film is not attempting to build a story about the artist; instead its purpose is to tell the story of the two fans and their search into the history of this artist.