Elijah Wood sure has slipped comfortably into B-movies after his stint at the Shire, hasn’t he? When I first stumbled upon Open Windows, I was expecting something along the lines of Wood’s bomb-in-a-piano thriller Grand Piano. There are similarities: both films are quintessential B-thrillers, escalating a catchy premise into something tense (and a little silly).…
There’s no reason Nurse 3-D couldn’t have worked. A bloody mixture of sex-negative horror, nurse sexploitation and American Psycho sounds like it should be an interesting mess. Instead Nurse 3-D is just bloody terrible, a Frankenstein’s monster lurching awkwardly through the detritus of better B-movies, assembling the occasional “so-bad-it’s-good” moment within its remarkably tedious eighty-four…
You know what you’re getting into when you watch a film with a title like Cheerleader Massacre. Bad acting is par for the course: the actors might look like the Days of Our Lives type, but their thespian ability falls short of even that mark. There’s no reason to be surprised by home-video quality cinematography…
The modern trends of B-movie production are on full display in the “they-thought-of-the-title-and-went-from-there” flick Attack of the 50 Ft Cheerleader. It features a handful of D-list celebrities like Sean Young, Treat Williams and Ted Raimi in “starring roles” that were obviously filmed in a day; each is occasionally entertaining but primarily depressing. There’s the now-necessary…
Piranha, an undisguised Jaws ripoff from the late ‘70s, is no match for the Spielberg’s blockbuster phenomenon (which makes a cameo appearance as a video game). This Roger Corman creature feature, helmed by Joe Dante (of Gremlins fame) is nonetheless a surprisingly good B-movie. It contains all the B-movie trappings: skinny dipping teenagers, unconvincing special…
At the age of sixteen, I came into the possession of a Blockbuster card with the video rental store only a short bike ride from home. I used school holidays to forage for the grittiest-looking R-rated video tapes around. My choices were, admittedly, often motivated by a desire for sex and nudity, but the rewards…
Piranha 3DD is a grotesque Frankenstein’s monster of a film, B-movie components clumsily sutured together without imagination. These extremities are sporadically entertaining, but while Ving Rhames blasting piranhas with a shotgun in slow motion might have its appeal, this slim charm is amputated by the film’s troglodytic smirk, its sneering need to ridicule the very…
When you hear the best zombie films of all time discussed, David Cronenberg’s Shivers is rarely mentioned. This is an injustice, as the film deserves to stand alongside the greats. Perhaps it’s because the mindless hordes of Shivers aren’t technically zombies, but people overcome by a virulent parasite that amplifies sexual urges to the detriment…
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