Good Afternoon Ladies & Gentlemen,
The holidays are literally at the doorstep & the Winter Solstice is upon us!!! So stay warm by the fireplace and watch some movies with us... December 15 – Sisters of Death (1976) So the movie starts out with a sorority initiation, you know… all that cloak & dagger BS you hear about in college, but ugh… then one of the pledges get shot in the head during a “trust blast” or something. Cut to 7 years later… and the girls at the scene are being sent mysterious letters to meet in Paso Robles, California for a reunion or something… and hijinx ensue. Now, this movie is pretty ridiculous. There are some long takes that could be tightened up easily because it’s waiting for people to walk or park or whatever, the choices the characters make are questionable at best, the dialogue is meh… but I still had fun with it. You can kind of piece together what’s going to happen but… yeah, it’s just kind of ridiculous leading up to the reveal. Rating – 7/10 – You could do a lot worse… and there’s a Rifftrax version December 16 – Death Promise (1977) What? Another Rifftrax version of a movie? Yes, but this one is a martial arts vengeance tale about a man whose father is killed by wealthy slumlords… and oh man, some of the topics that come up in this 70s movie hit harder today with the greed of developers & real estate. The fight scenes are okay… the plot is fairly predictable in that you kind of know that it’s going to end a little stupid… but yeah, I’d recommend a watch. Rating – 8/10 – I’m a sucker for martial arts movies December 17 – Dark Future (1994) When humans are decimated by a plague in the 21st century (huh?), the remaining apparently live underground as sex slaves to cyborgs who rule with an iron fist. From director Greydon Clark (“Uninvited” and other cheap trash) and starring Darby Hinton (“Malibu Express” ten years later) and I think other actors that only worked in this or other Greydon Clark movies, yeah… it’s an absolute mess of a movie… but a fun watch with your friends on Rifftrax. There’s the bones of a good movie here though… it’s called Reverse Westworld… Eastworld?!? Rating – 6/10 – Fun to laugh at… that’s about it December 18 – The Last Starfighter (1984) Okay, this is one from my childhood that I saw a bunch on TV on like Saturday Matinees… and it fits with our theme the “Last Month” so we watched it for the podcast. Basically a trailer park kid named Alex (with a smoking hot girlfriend played by friend of the podcast Catherine Mary Stewart) is good at an arcade game, which is actually a recruiting tool for an intergalactic space force, so then he basically gets tricked into joining the space force as a pilot because he’s so good at it. The special effects are a little dated by today’s standard but… honestly it’s not that bad because a lot of the practical stuff matches with the CGI perfectly. Like the futuristic car that Centauri drives matches well with the base in the fake planet shots, etc. It’s also just a fun kids movie really with a lot of heart. Rating – 10/10 – It got the Catherine Mary Stewart bump from a 9… but yeah, check it out! They keep talking about a remake but… it’s just talk until it hits theatres (or streaming) December 19 – Sherlock Holmes in The Woman in Green (1945) We also watched a Rifftrax of this Basil Rathbone portrayal of Sherlock Holmes where there’s a serial killer taking out women daily and severing their fingers. Scotland Yard is at a loss… except that it’s probably “some big friggin’ guy” as they would say in Boondock Saints. Holmes however thinks that it might be the work of the most diabolical mind to have ever lived… there’s only one thing though… Dr. Moriarty was hung for his crimes already! How could HE still be murdering these women? Hijinx ensue. I liked it… there’s a lot of the kind of dialogue that you would expect in this sort of tale… and though a lot of the contrivances you’ve seen dozens of times before are done, at least they’re done fairly well. Watson was a boob… but apparently that’s the Nigel Bruce portrayal in the 40’s instead of the competent sidekick in other versions I’ve seen. Rating – 8/10 – Holmes movies are worst when they’re just boring… and this one’s only like 65 minutes so I don’t think it had time for that. December 20 – No Retreat No Surrender (1986) For January, our theme is Jean-Claude Van January (like the 4th month we’ve had dedicated to the Muscles from Brussels) and so we’re going with the 2nd movie where he was actually credited (he was in the Breakin’ movies as a backup dancer & only earlier credit role is as “Gay Karate Man” in Monaco Forever). This movie is about a teenage boy who idolizes Bruce Lee… and befriends a kid when he moves to Seattle after his dad is crippled by a Russian karate man (JCVD) working for the NYC Karate Mafia after they tried to take over his dojo (in LA by the way) but then hijinx ensue when the teenage boy runs away from home to live in an abandoned crack house & the Ghost of Bruce Lee himself shows up to train him. The movie is a trip… Rating – 10/10 – This movie is always fun to watch with friends… and I blame the friend RJ. There’s a lot going on in this movie that’s NEVER explained. December 21 – The Bride & the Beast (1958) I was won over reading the synopsis that a woman married a man with a gorilla (which apparently she didn’t know before they were married?) and then through hypnosis she was the Queen of the Gorillas in a past life… Yup, I’m watching this! THEN I found out that the writer was… Edward D Wood jr… Ed Wood himself (along with writer/director Adrian Weiss) so… absolutely I’m watching this movie. To say this movie is chauvinistic is putting it quite lightly… but yeah, there’s an idiot great white hunter husband… the wife is I’m assuming a product of her upbringing… a guy in an ape suit… and yet, it’s so bad that I honestly had no idea what was going to happen. Rating – 8/10 – Of course I recommend the Rifftrax version of this movie… but yeah, entertainingly bad. Have a happy holiday season with your loved ones & I'll try to catch you before 2023 rings in!!! Steve
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Steve and Izzy
Steve and Izzy are the hosts behind the EILFM podcast, are BJCP beer judges and have terrible to questionable taste in movies. Along with the PodCats Pickles, Cameron and Poe they will justify why these movies are amazing Archives
December 2024
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