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The Blair Witch Project A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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The Blair Witch Project (1999) – A Movie A Day 2021 #37

The Blair Witch Project poster

It was kind of a rough day, so I decided to pick a movie to watch that I knew I’d love. Something of a comfort movie. I have a lot of standbys that I go to depending on my mood, but I decided to pick an older favorite I hadn’t seen in a long time but had randomly been on my mind recently. Today’s movie of the day is The Blair Witch Project, a movie that I consider to be one of the best of its breed. 

Most of you reading this probably already know what The Blair Witch Project is about, but I’ll go ahead and recap it just in case. The movie is framed as actual film and video footage found deep in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. The footage was supposedly shot by three film students, Heather, Josh, and Mike, as they were gathering footage for a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. The trio went missing during their trip into the woods and were never found, and the footage we see in the movie is supposed to show us their final days before becoming a part of the legend they were there to investigate.

One of the reasons The Blair Witch gives me such good feelings undoubtedly has to with with the fact that I experienced the amazing marketing buildup to the movie as it was happening. I discovered the existence of the movie not by seeing a traditional movie poster, but by coming across a “missing” flyer hanging up at a small independent theater. I was intrigued. There was also a web site created for the movie (which is still online!) that has images from the movie plus tons of “evidence” and extra videos portrayed as real-life interviews and news footage about the missing students. Even though I knew it was just a movie, the length the filmmakers went to allow viewers to suspend their disbelief is admirable. So before I even saw the movie, I was already invested in the characters and the story in a big way.

The other big reason The Blair Witch Project gives me such good feelings is because I remember what it felt like seeing it in a theater for the first time. It was such a unique experience in a lot of ways. For one thing, it had to be the first time I’d seen a movie in the 4:3 aspect ratio in a theater, and that helped add to the realness of the experience. Also, the quality of the footage was all over the place which, again, adds to the realness and the uniqueness of the theatrical experience. Shots were out of focus and fuzzy, big moments often happened off screen, and the ever-present “shaky cam” that I know so many people dislike all worked wonders on me. I was enthralled from beginning to end. I was so excited after leaving the theater because it was such a new and fun experience. 

I know a lot of people look down on found footage for various reasons, and I get it (mostly), but when its done right, it can be fantastic. For my tastes, The Blair Witch Project is done right, and that starts with how it was made. Now, I’m not trying to write an essay on The Blair Witch Project or found footage movies in general, but here’s a brief explanation of why the movie works so well for me. As I understand it, all of the footage was shot by the three main actors as they spent a few days and nights effectively isolated in the woods. They were given drop boxes with clues on where to go next and secret guidelines for how their characters should react in certain situations, but otherwise they were left on their own to shoot footage and improvise the scenes. Crew members were kept hidden from the actors during the day, and the crew would increasingly harass the actors at night as the Blair Witch got closer and closer. It sounds like an excruciating ordeal, but it made for a movie that feels more realistic than most other found footage films. 

One of my biggest pet peeves about found footage is when the action is too perfect on screen. Like when the camera pans over at just the right moment to perfectly frame some big action or line of dialogue. Or when it seems clear that scenes were done repeatedly because of cuts between shots that are supposed to be in the same moment, yet the footage feels disconnected within the space of where the characters are. I get why most movies do that, filmmakers want important moments to feel important, but it makes it feel less real to me. Important moments are missed all the time in real life, and people panicking are going to miss more than they see. Stuff is missed all the time in The Blair Witch Project, and not seeing what’s in the woods yet hearing the panic in the voices of the actors as they flail around with their cameras is far scarier in my opinion. That said, if you get motion sickness from shaky cam, maybe skip this movie. 

I could go on about why I love The Blair Witch Project so much, but in the end it really all comes down to the fact that I think it’s a well-made movie that does exactly what it sets out to do. It feels real for the most part, and I love the gradual buildup to the final few scenes. I’ve seen a bunch of found footage movies over the years, many I enjoyed and many not so much, but The Blair Witch Project will always be in the upper echelon of the format. 

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Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain (2004) – A Movie A Day 2021 #36

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain poster

Continuing (and maybe ending) my loosely-linked movie watching streak, today’s flick pick features one of the stars and the director from yesterday’s movie. Charles Band, a prolific director and producer of low budget movies and the creator of Full Moon Features, directed Decadent Evil as well as today’s movie, and Debra Mayer, the master vampire Morella from Decadent Evil, plays a plucky news reporter named Mary Anne in today’s feature. And so, without any further ado, today I’ll be writing about Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, a strangely fun movie with blood and gore, mad scientists, and manimals. Yeah, manimals.

A title like Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain tells you a few things without even seeing a single frame of the film. First, the “Dr. Moreau’s” part of the title tells you that the movie will have at least some passing resemblance to H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau or any of its many adaptations. I’ve never read the novel, and I can’t remember seeing any of its adaptations all the way through, but I understand there are human/animal hybrids in it. Judging by Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, I imagine that’s all the writer of the movie knew about the original novel as well.

The second half of the title, House of Pain, tells you that this is probably going to be a violent movie without a whole lot in the way of subtext or symbolism. I suppose you could also gather that information knowing that this is a Full Moon movie directed by Charles Band, but even if you didn’t know that (which I didn’t when I first came across the movie), the title still instills a sense of lurid shallowness. Once again, after watching the movie, the title is spot on.

And together “Dr. Moreau’s” and “House of Pain” tell you that you’re in for some b-movie campiness and cheesiness if you decide to watch it. I made that decision, and I definitely got what was promised. I think I even enjoyed it more than Decadent Evil.

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain is set sometime in or around the 1940s, and it follows a guy named Eric, his best friend Mary Anne, and his brother’s ex-girlfriend, Judith, as they search for Eric’s missing brother. A quick trip to the local strip joint gives Eric a lead in his search. Eric follows a stripper, Alliana, whom his brother apparently had the hots for. Before Eric can ask Alliana any questions, he sees her punch her hand straight through some guy’s head for trying to force himself on her. Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith follow the woman to a huge house on the outskirts of town, and inside they discover, naturally, Dr. Moreau’s house of pain.

Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith are quickly taken prisoner, and the movie follows their efforts to try to escape with their lives and all of their body parts. See, Dr. Moreau is back from his island vacation, and he’s now being forced to repeatedly operate to try to turn some of his hideous creations into normal humans. There’s a short pig man named Gallagher, a huge panther (or something) man named PeeWee, and a fish woman named Gorgana. Gorgana is the daughter of Pak, Dr. Moreau’s former assistant who now forces Moreau to keep working until he fixes his daughter. And there’s also Alliana, a beautiful and deadly creation that looks like a human, but has enhanced strength and a huge mean streak. There is a whole bunch of drama between all the members of the house of pain, but the real focus of the story is seeing if Eric, Mary Anne, and Judith can escape before they end up next on the mad doctor’s operating table. Or worse. It get worse, but I’ll let you experience that if you decide to watch.

The movie is full of camp and cheese. Whether that’s good or not is up to your personal cheese tolerance, but I enjoyed it. The pseudo-1940s dialogue felt really cumbersome in the first few scenes, but after a while I started to find the stilted lines kind of charming. I mean, when I see a pig man spouting flowery soliloquies at people chained up in a cage, I can’t help but enjoy it on some level.

Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain is all about brightly colored, tilted camera, monstery goodness built on a base of ridiculous drama with a bit of nudity every so often for variety. I liked it fine. Am I being too forgiving? Maybe. The continuity is often laughable, the plot is stretched to its breaking point just so the movie can get to where the next scene needs to be, and lots of character moments just don’t make sense. But as a mindless way to spend 71 minutes of my life, I can think of worse things.

As a parting thought, the poster artwork for the movie is fantastic. That’s really what made me choose this movie over anything else. Also, I know the movie is going to be 17 years old this year, but I’d like to see a sequel with some new manimals (that’s Dr. Moreau’s word, not mine). Not to spoil anything, but lots of things die in this movie, so the sequel will need new human/animal hybrids. I would like to suggest half shark alligator half man, and I would like Dr. Octagon to write the dialogue for the film. If you’re unfamiliar with these references, please enjoy the following song.

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Decadent Evil A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Decadent Evil (2005) – A Movie A Day 2021 #35

The Decadent Evil DVD cover.

Today’s movie of the day is a strange one. Still continuing my linked-movie choices, the movie I watched technically contains a lot of the actors from yesterday’s movie, Vampire Journals. That’s because today’s movie, Decadent Evil, uses a whole lot of footage from Vampire Journals to set up an entirely new and almost completely unrelated story. It’s weird.

I actually bought the DVD for Decadent Evil sometime last year, probably in the dollar bin of my local used movie store. I got it because the DVD cover looks kind of dumb, and I like dumb horror movies. I started watching it soon after purchase, but I stopped once I realized that it might be a sequel or a spinoff or something. It’s kind of neither of those things though, and the use of the footage from Vampire Journals feels like the filmmakers were just padding the movie to make it over an hour long. Now that I’ve finally gotten around to watching Vampire Journals, it made sense to pick Decadent Evil next. Was it worth the wait? Not really.

Decadent Evil starts out with a digest version of the entire plot of Vampire Journals. The stories of Ash, Zachary, and Sofia are told pretty much in their entirety as we watch ten minutes of clips from the movie. Towards the end of the recap, we are told that one of Ash’s underlings, the vampiric Cassandra, left the country after the events of Vampire Journals and started her own vampire clan in America. The thing is, Cassandra isn’t in Decadent Evil at all, and unless I missed something she’s not even mentioned. The movie focuses on a trio of female vampires, and I assume the insinuation is that they are descended from Cassandra, but now that I think about, that doesn’t make sense time-wise. So yeah, it’s already a rough start and the real movie hasn’t even started yet. 

Oh, but I forgot to mention the narrator for the opening recap that has nothing to do with the movie. The first shot of Decadent Evil is of a homunculus, a tiny red humanoid thing. He’s a creepy-looking puppet in a cage, and we don’t get an explanation of who or what he is until well into the the movie. But anyway, the beginning of the movie goes from the shot of the homunculus right into the recap, and there is someone narrating the events we’re watching. Naturally, since the only humanoid thing I’d seen so far was the tiny red puppet, I assumed he was the one narrating the story. Like, maybe he’s actually really smart, or maybe he was once a human and got mixed up in some dangerous magical scenario. But despite one of those things being sort of true, we don’t find out any of that until way later. And it’s not like they’re big reveals that have meaning for the story. They’re just things the filmmaker decided not to mention. 

So, if you watch Decadent Evil just skip the first ten minutes. You don’t need any of the information from it, and it might actually be distracting because you might make a bunch of incorrect and pointless assumptions like I did. While you’re at it, just skip ahead to the thirteen-minute mark. There are about three minutes of credits that feel like they go on for another ten. I appreciate the use of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer font for the credits, but they were just too long. So now, once the ensuing establishing shots are done, the movie begins for real about fourteen minutes in. With the movie being only 74 minutes long, that’s one-fifth of the run time wasted. 

You know, you might as well skip the first real sequence of the movie too. The first two characters we really get to meet are a pushy scumbag of a guy and his reluctant girlfriend (or wife or something, I’m not sure). The guy begs and pushes his girlfriend into going to a strip club. Then he pleads with her to go with him when one of the dancers invites them over to her house for a more hands-on encounter. Then he guilts her into having a ménage à trois which she clearly doesn’t want to do. But finally, well over twenty minutes into the movie, the guy is mercifully killed by a vampire that we haven’t gotten to know yet. The girlfriend is also slaughtered, and about twenty-five minutes into the movie we finally start to learn what’s going on. 

Three female vampires live together in a mansion somewhere in or near Los Angeles. Morella is the master of the house. Morella has lived for an unknown yet very long amount of time, and she is on the verge of maybe becoming invincible because of some blood thing they explain in the movie (it’s not important enough for this journal entry or really even for the movie for me to explain it here). Morella acts like a domineering mother to Sugar and Spyce, two younger and less experienced vampires. It was Spyce who brought the guy and girlfriend home, and it was Morella who killed them. Morella and Spyce are your typical evil seductresses, but Sugar is a nice vampire. Sugar has a boyfriend named Dex, and when Dex is visited by a vampire hunter named Ivan, Dex puts his life on the line to save Sugar, and Sugar puts her life on the line to save Dex. It all builds up to a tepid vampire-slaying session with more discussion than action. Oh yeah, and the homunculus’s name is Marvin, and he doesn’t really even play much of a role in the movie despite being in the gross final shot. Then we get about eight minutes of credits and the movie is over. 

In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t care much for Decadent Evil. Without all the padding at the beginning and end, the actual story part of the movie is about 45 minutes long. I enjoyed the laughable effects such as when the guy at the beginning of the movie gets his throat slashed, but it’s 100% clear that the ensuing blood comes not from his neck, but from someone squirting it on his cheek from off camera. I kind of liked the idea of the forbidden love between Dex and Sugar, but I never truly felt like they were in much danger. And I had to laugh when a certain connection was revealed between the vampire hunter and Marvin the homunculus. So I guess you could say I enjoyed Decadent Evil for what it is, but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to movies though, and I know Decadent Evil II exists, so look for that in a future installment of A Movie A Day. It won’t be any time soon though. 

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Vampire Journals A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Vampire Journals (1997) – A Movie A Day 2021 #34

Vampire Journals DVD cover

Continuing my linked-movie journey I began a couple days ago with Dead Space, today I watched a movie from the same director as yesterday’s movie, Subspecies. Ted Nicolau directed all the movies in the Subspecies series, but instead of one of those, today I picked a spinoff of the series titled Vampire Journals. If Subspecies felt like it drew its inspirations from classical gothic vampire movies including Nosferatu, then Vampire Journals draws most heavily on the moody, tortured souls of Interview with the Vampire. You might even go so far as to call Vampire Journals a bit of a rip-off of the film version of Anne Rice’s tale, but I’ll be nice just say it feels very much like an homage in a lot of ways.

Vampire Journals follows Zachary, a vampire “with the heart of a mortal.” Zachary, with his chiseled features and long hair not dissimilar to Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, is a vampire hunter of sorts. Zachary is currently on the hunt for Ash, a powerful vampire who has doomed/gifted many people with eternal life. It is Zachary’s mission to end Ash and his entire bloodline, but as Zachary stalks Ash’s extravagant lair in New York, he takes pity on a woman, Sofia, who has become the target of Ash’s “affections.” Zachary does his best to protect Sofia while still attempting to find a way to kill Ash, but Ash is powerful and has many allies. Plus, Zachary struggles daily (or rather, nightly) with his more sinister vampiric urges. What follows a dark and moody story with a lot of highly dramatic vampire dialogue and dreamy, Victorian-esque imagery.

Like Subspecies, I was a little surprised with how serious the focus of Vampire Journals is considering it’s a Full Moon production. I usually think of campy, silly horror movies when I think of Full Moon, but maybe I just haven’t seen enough of their library. Vampire Journals can verge on being campy with how it unabashedly adopts many of the vampire genre’s clichés, but its approach to every scene is so serious that I feel like the filmmakers really just wanted to make a good, pure vampire movie. Scenes can be overly dramatic at times, but that just seems to come with the package. The tortured-soul vampire kind of has to be overly dramatic, doesn’t it?

As for how I enjoyed the movie, I liked it fine. This isn’t the style of vampire movie I’ll usually pick as a first choice, but the characters were interesting and the movie was well made. I enjoyed how the filmmakers made the most of what I assume was a fairly small budget. There are some beheadings and other bloody moments, and they all look good. My favorite part was how they represented the vampire’s ability to “fly” though. There would be a shot of a real shadow moving against the background of the scene, then the vampire would “materialize” in a jump cut. I’m pretty sure it was all done practically, and it looked really good. It’s some great ingenuity that I absolutely appreciated.

And yeah, I appreciate the movie as a whole. I doubt I’ll revisit it again any time soon, but I’m glad I watched it. I will get back to the Subspecies movies after a while, and I understand one of the characters from Vampire Journals appears in the fourth installment of that series. I do hope the rest of the Subspecies movies are more about classical vampire ambiance rather than tortured-soul vampire drama though. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the movies either way, but I’ll enjoy them more if they’re more like the first Subspecies.

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Subspecies A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Subspecies (1991) – A Movie A Day 2021 #33

Subspecies poster

For today’s movie I decided to try something a little different. Rather than just pick some random movie based on little more than a whim, I thought I’d pick something to watch based on what I watched yesterday. So yesterday I watched Dead Space, and today I decided to watch a movie featuring one of the main actors from that movie. No, I didn’t go with the obvious and choose another Bryan Cranston film even though he was the only actor I really wrote about yesterday. Instead, I picked something starring Laura Tate who, in Dead Space, stars as Dr. Salinger, the level-headed love interest of the space cowboy main character. In today’s movie of the day Laura Tate plays Michele, the mostly level-headed love interest of a friendly vampire. The movie I chose is the Full Moon cult-classic vampire tale, Subspecies. 

I’ve heard about Subspecies for years and have its home-video cover artwork set in my memory, but I’ve never actually watched it. That is, until now. Subspecies is a gothic-inspired vampire movie that seems to borrow its aesthetic from some of the classic Hammer horror films with a bit of 1922’s Nosferatu thrown in. The movie focuses on a trio of young women, Michele, Mara, and Lillian, who travel to Romania to study local folklore. Meanwhile, Radu, an evil vampire with fangs and extra-long fingers reminiscent of Count Orlok, has traveled to the same Romanian village to kill his vampiric father (played by Angus Scrimm of Phantasm) and steal the legendary Bloodstone. The young women inevitably cross paths with Radu during their explorations, and what follows is a fun and familiar vampire story with skittish villagers, secretive vampire attacks, and a buildup to a final showdown in an ancient castle.

The first thing that struck me about Subspecies is how good it looks. It was shot on location in Romania, so the visuals are fantastic. The special effects can be somewhat hit and miss, but even some of the lesser effects are charming in a b-movie way. The cheesiest effects are easily Radu’s tiny stop-motion minions, but I think they give the movie a classic feel. Radu is the only vampire that is ever made up to look inhuman, and he looks and acts convincing in the role. His long fingers seem to be an annoyance for him and make it look kind of silly when he tries to hold things (especially when he attempts to sword fight), but the neat visual effect his fingers give when he’s vamping through the scenery is a valid trade-off. Also, his fingers help make his shadowy entrances and exits from rooms that much more fun in a German-expressionism-esque way. 

While Radu is definitely the most fun and memorable character in Subspecies, everyone else does a good job as well. Michele becomes the focus of Radu’s benevolent brother Stefan (who is also trying to get his hands on the Bloodstone), and Stefan’s interest in Michele makes her a target for Radu. There’s a bit of cat and mouse chase throughout the movie that climaxes with a fun final battle and a satisfying ending. The love story between Michele and Stefan feels a bit light, but the ambiance of the movie as a whole made me not care about that so much. I just had fun with the classic feeling of the movie and the plot that felt so familiar that I knew pretty much everything that was going to happen well before it actually happened. 

There are four total Subspecies movies and one spinoff. I’m probably going to pick tomorrow’s movie in a similar way to how I picked today’s, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll pick the next Subspecies movie in the series. I definitely do want to watch them all at some point, but I might space them out a little. 

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Dead Space A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Dead Space (1991) – A Movie A Day 2021 #32

A nice and misleading Dead Space poster.

My recent viewing of Leviathan put me in a mood for similar sci-fi horror movies, so I searched around until I found something that stood out to me. I stopped searching once I came across Dead Space, a movie that looked like a super-cheap Alien rip-off from 1991 starring Bryan Cranston. Well, Bryan Cranston doesn’t star in the movie necessarily, I’d say he’s a co-star at best, but he is in it. Everything else I assumed about the Dead Space is accurate though. It is indeed a super-cheap Alien rip-off, and I had a lot of fun with it. 

Apparently Dead Space is not only a rip-off of Alien, but it’s also a remake of a movie called Forbidden World from 1982. I haven’t seen Forbidden World yet, though I’m sure I will soon. Anyway, here’s the plot for Dead Space. In the future, a “space cowboy” by the name of Steve Krieger intercepts a distress call from a remote research station on an alien planet (the wiki page and IMDB both say the station is on Saturn, but it definitely is not). Krieger arrives to help out, but he finds that not everyone wants him there. Out of courtesy for his trouble, head scientists Emily Stote and Frank Darden (Cranston) inform him of their situation. The small science team at the station have been researching a virus which has mutated beyond their expectations. Stote and Darden think the situation is being handled just fine, but the scientist who sent the distress call, Marissa Salinger, thinks their situation is anything but under control. Krieger ends up staying for a while, and naturally the virus (which is actually an organism that can mutate and transit a virus) escapes and causes havoc. Then the rest of the movie is all about the small crew trying to survive and kill the virus monster before it murders them all. 

Like Alien and a thousand other movies that came after Alien, Dead Space is full of dark, claustrophobic hallways being stalked by a creature that gets progressively bigger and more dangerous as the movie goes on. There is a chest bursting scene, multiple scenes with panicked crew members trying to find the tiny and quick monster in the room before it escapes into the air ducts, and even a scene where the monster turns into a Giger-esque creature that towers over the crew. The effects are laughable and fun in a goofy b-movie way, and the plot takes some head-shaking turns that I couldn’t help but smile at. Dead Space is not a good movie, but it is fun. If nothing else, Dead Space was a good late-night movie to go to sleep to, and it opened the door for me to watch some other related movies. 

My only real complaint is that the cover art and title are completely misleading. Some of the cooler posters and VHS art for Dead Space show an skeleton in a torn-up astronaut suit floating in space. That never happens in the movie, and the bulk of the movie doesn’t even take place in space. I mean, the interiors the crew members are in are effectively just like any other outer-space horror movie, so maybe I’m getting hung up on a technicality. But if you promise me a skeleton in space, at least make a slight attempt to give me a skeleton in space. 

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Leviathan A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Leviathan (1989) – A Movie A Day 2021 #31

Leviathan poster

Back in 1989, a cluster of underwater movies were released that would leave me with a life-long fascination with the deep sea. The Abyss is by far the most famous and successful of these water-logged sci-fi films, but it wasn’t the first of the bunch to be released. Presumably other filmmakers were aware of James Cameron’s underwater alien movie during its long production, and they probably figured they might as well try to capitalize on the growing hype for The Abyss. One of those movies that beat The Abyss to theaters is Leviathan, and that is today’s movie of the day.

I think I’ve seen Leviathan before, but it’s been decades, and I didn’t remember anything about. For years, I would confuse Leviathan with DeepStar Six, another similar movie that came out even earlier in 1989, but I think that’s just because I’ve seen DeepStar Six a few times over the years while I’ve only seen Leviathan maybe once. Well, now I’ve seen it twice, and Leviathan is now firmly planted in my brain as one of the better underwater sci-fi horror movies.

Leviathan features a setup that has been used in numerous underwater and outer-space movies. A crew of eccentric misfits is isolated in a vaguely near-futuristic facility where they are mining for natural resources The crew is led by Steven Beck (Peter Weller), a geologist who seems to have been wrangled into doing a job he doesn’t enjoy and isn’t even really qualified for. Beck does not have the respect of his crew as the movie begins, and that lack of respect is going to be tested when things get worse for everyone very soon. Beck’s crew includes a slightly elitist doctor who goes by “Doc” (Richard Crenna), a serious and disciplined athlete named Elizabeth “Willie” Williams (Amanda Pays), a skeptical and aggressive worker named Justin Jones (Ernie Hudson), the offensive and chauvinistic comic relief called “Sixpack” (Daniel Stern), and a few other crew members who don’t necessarily last long enough to make huge impressions. The cast is fantastic, and they do a great job making this very familiar-feeling movie even better than it might have been otherwise.

The story involves the crew discovering a sunken Russian ship, The Leviathan, and bringing some of the ship’s items back into their own facility. Beck and Doc are only starting to learn about what happened to the ship’s crew and why The Leviathan was apparently intentionally sunk when one of Beck’s crew begins to feel ill. That crew member doesn’t last long, and that begins a snowball effect that leads to a fight for survival that feels like a mash-up of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien, only it’s happening underwater as opposed to in space or in the snow. Those are two great movies to emulate, and the quality of Leviathan helps it transcend what might otherwise just feel like a blatant rip-off.

Leviathan is directed by George Cosmatos who also directed Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra in the years prior to Leviathan. Rambo: First Blood Part II is one of the greatest action movies of all time, so Leviathan definitely has some great action scenes. The writers of Leviathan are Jeb Stuart (who previously wrote Die Hard) and David Webb Peoples (who previously wrote Blade Runner), Stan Winston studios did the special effects, and Jerry Goldsmith did the music. So yeah, the crew is just as fantastic as the cast. 

Leviathan is essentially a straightforward genre movie, and for what it is I think it’s great. I don’t think it broke as much new ground as The Abyss as far as its concept and filmmaking techniques go, but Leviathan is an incredibly fun and well made horror movie. The two films can’t really be compared directly anyway since their purposes and tones are so different, so I won’t even try. I’ll just say that I love them both.

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No Holds Barred (1989) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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No Holds Barred (1989) – A Movie A Day 2021 #30

No Holds Barred poster

Today’s movie is something that I had to watch. If you don’t already know, I do a podcast about pro wrestling with my best friend Joey. It’s called The Wrestling House Show, and we’ve been covering a lot of retro wrestling events for an ongoing series we’re doing. We’re watching all these shows in order starting back in the early 1980s, and to enhance the experience we’ll sometimes look out for other media from the era to indulge in. We might play a video game that came out around the same time as the shows we’re watching, we might read a pro-wrestling magazine from the time, or in this case we watched a movie that had been heavily promoted during many of the World Wrestling Federation shows we’ve been reviewing. The movie was promoted so hard on WWF’s (now WWE’s) shows that they even took a character straight out of the movie and had him wrestling the champ at the time, Hulk Hogan. That character was Zeus, and that movie is No Holds Barred. 

No Holds Barred is not a good movie, but it can be a fun movie at times for fans of pro wrestling and for fans of bad action movies. I like to make the best of things, so I’ll try to look at the positives for this journal entry. I’ll also try to keep this brief because Joey and I did a nearly hour-long review of the movie (plus a couple of related pro-wrestling matches) earlier today, and I’m kind of done talking about No Holds Barred for a while. If you want to check out that review, it will be posted on The Wrestling House Show sometime in the future (though it will probably be a while). 

No Holds Barred stars Terry Bollea as Hulk Hogan as Rip, the WWF Champ. It’s a big stretch for Hogan as an actor because in No Holds Barred he’s wearing blue and white ring gear instead of yellow and red. Also, his name is Rip instead of Hulk, so yeah, totally different character. Rip is a kind-hearted, charitable guy who beats people up on TV for a living. The cartoonishly evil head of a rival TV network, Mr. Brell (played by Kurt Fuller), wants Rip to work for him because Rip equals ratings. Brell tries to buy Rip’s loyalty, but Rip won’t break his current contract. Brell gets angry, and that begins a vendetta for Brell to either get Rip to work for him or destroy Rip in the process. Brell ends up coming up with an idea to air no-rules bar fights on live TV, and that draws the interest of an ex-con named Zeus (played by Tiny Lister). Brell orchestrates a plan to pit Zeus and Rip against each other, and yeah, you get the idea.

The movie plays out like like a cartoon with lots of poop jokes and violence. Coming from an era where mainstream pro-wrestling (i.e. WWF) was getting more and more cartoonish, you can see where the over-the-top nature of the movie comes from. Plus, Vince McMahon (the owner of WWE) apparently had a hand in changing the script along with Hulk Hogan, and if you’re a wrestling fan and are familiar with Vince’s sense of humor, you’ll know what to expect from No Holds Barred. 

With as not-great as the movie can be, I will say that it has a very good cast. Aside from Hogan who is fine playing himself, Kurt Fuller is great as the main villain Brell. He’s slimy and smarmy, and he has just enough menace to make him feel dangerous. Tiny Lister is also great in everything he does. Like Hogan, this movie wasn’t a big stretch for Lister either, but Zeus does look convincing as he flexes and yells a lot (a lot more convincing than he looks in an actual wrestling ring). Plus, Joan Severance plays Rip’s love interest, Sam. I can’t say I’m very happy with the way the script treats Severance’s character, and in fact, the attacks on Sam are some of my least favorite parts of the movie, but Joan Severance always does great with whatever she’s given. 

The plot of the movie is predictable and formulaic, but it works fine for a goofy movie like this. Does it always make sense realistically. No, absolutely not, but does that really matter when it comes to fun? I don’t think so. In general, people who went to see No Holds Barred when it came out were probably fans of pro-wrestling already, so the biggest fun to be had was seeing Hogan/Rip beat people up and to watch out for all of the cameos and references to pro-wrestling scattered throughout the movie. The audience who would enjoy No Holds Barred today is probably the same group, though it definitely skews more towards long-time and/or retro wrestling fans rather than modern fans. That is, unless you just want to watch it to complain and make fun of it which seems to be a popular activity these days.

The movie is an interesting part of pro-wrestling history if nothing else because it literally became part of the show for about half a year. It also helped usher Hogan back into movies which he would do a lot more of going into the 1990s. Hogan still had some memorable feuds in WWF after No Holds Barred came out, but newer stars were starting to rise, and Hogan’s many, many years on top of the WWF felt like they were beginning to wind down. So even though Hogan made his film debut in Rocky III in 1982, No Holds Barred is really what kicked off his movie career, such as it was. So… that’s good? I don’t know. It’s something, that’s for sure. 

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Firecracker (1981) A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Firecracker (1981) – A Movie A Day 2021 #29

Firecracker poster (which has little to do with what’s in the movie)

For today’s movie, I went back to Tubi to scan through some more movie posters. I was in an action mood, so I started my search browsing through their martial arts movies. I didn’t remember Tubi’s selection of martial arts movies being all that great, especially when compared to their fairly deep B-horror-movie choices, but I guess it’s been a while since I looked. I spent a decent amount of time looking through a nicely sized list of martial arts films from my favorite decades for the genre, the 70s and 80s. Once again I let the cover art speak for itself, I settled on a movie from 1981 titled Firecracker, and I might have found another fun rabbit hole to venture down with some of my upcoming movie choices.

Firecracker stars Jillian Kesner as Susanne Carter, a 6th-degree black belt in karate who travels to the Philippines on a mission. Susanne is searching for her journalist sister, Bonnie, who has gone missing while working on a story. A clue leads Susanne to a man named Chuck, a member of an organized crime group dealing in drugs and underground fights to the death. As Susanne gets closer to Chuck in an attempt to gain information about her sister, she becomes entangled in dangerous plot of drug deals gone bad, back-stabbing, and a fair amount of bloody murder. For Susanne, the only way out may be through a whole bunch of punching and kicking.

I had a lot of fun with Firecracker. It’s my kind of b-movie martial arts action. The plot is simple enough, and there are lots and lots of excuses for fight scenes to break out. And sometimes the movie doesn’t even need an excuse. Fights will sometimes just break out for no reason, and I’m not complaining.

If you’ve seen movies like Kickboxer or Bloodsport (and really, about a hundred other movies with the same formula), you’ll know mostly what to expect here. A foreigner (often American) journeys to an east/south-east Asian country, they get mixed up in some local crime, many fights are had, and it all leads up to a climactic battle with everything on the line. Firecracker even has a scene where the American (Susanne in this case) goes out into the wilderness to be trained by a wise old man. It’s classic stuff, and it’s great.

What I didn’t necessarily expect from Firecracker were some of the more brutal and bizarre scenes. To set the tone in the opening scene, we see Chuck fighting in some sort of underground competition (which we learn all about later). The fight is fun, then it takes a turn for the brutal when Chuck stabs his opponent with a spear, murdering him in a violent and bloody spectacle. Not every fight in the movie ends up that way, but there are a few gore effects throughout the movie that would fit right in with any number of b-level slasher movies.

There are some really bizarre scenes as well. Two in particular stand out to me as being either incongruous with the rest of the movie, or just plain weird considering the context of the situation. I won’t spoil them specifically, but I will give a generic description so you’ll know what I’m talking about if you watch it. The first is a scene that feels 100% like the movie was screened for producers or someone else with money, and they said the movie needed more blood and nudity. The scene happens about halfway through the movie, and it has absolutely nothing to with anything else in the story. It features a few more graphic murders, and it’s clearly an overt effort to titillate the audience with Susanne’s clothing being gradually removed as she fights against two attackers. None of the other fight scenes are like that, and it really stands out in a weird way for that reason. The other bizarre scene is a love scene later in the movie. I won’t talk about what happens, but I was just confused because it happens at a strange time for the characters. Plus, I didn’t think one of the characters felt that way to begin with. Oh yeah, and there are knives and a cat involved (sequentially, not at the same time).

So yeah, there’s some weirdness in Firecracker, but maybe that’s a good thing. It definitely helps the movie stand out, and I can’t say I’ll soon forget it. It also makes me want to check out the director’s other work. The director, Cirio H. Santiago, has directed 100 movies according to his IMDB page, and I’ve already seen that he has a few on Tubi. I might just have to check those out.

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Barbarian Queen A Movie A Day Journal Entry

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Barbarian Queen (1985) – A Movie A Day 2021 #28

The awesome Boris Vallejo poster for Barbarian Queen.

Earlier today I came across a poster for the movie Warrior Queen. I’ve never seen the movie, but the poster features artwork by the fantastic fantasy artist Boris Vallejo which immediately got me interested. As someone who grew up reading my dad’s old Conan comics, many of them with Boris Vallejo covers, I have a soft spot for Boris’s style of epic fantasy art. Now, I understand that many of the sword and sandals/sorcery movies that came out in the wake of the Conan the Barbarian movie in 1982 are cheaply made and often cheesy and/or trashy, and the fantastic poster artwork in no way represents what the actual movie is like, but I don’t care. I like cheap, cheesy, and trashy movies, so it all works out. With that in mind I headed over to Tubi to see if I could find Warrior Queen. I did find it, and I found a handful of other movies with similar artwork and similar writeups. With so many choices I had the thought of maybe watching a few of them, so instead of starting with Warrior Queen which was released in 1987, I chose Barbarian Queen which was released in 1985 (and also features Boris artwork). And if you were wondering if I was right about Barbarian Queen being cheap, cheesy, and trashy, I have just two words for you: Roger Corman. 

Apparently Roger Corman produced a series of films in Argentina in the 80s, ten of them if Wikipedia is to be believed, and Barbarian Queen was one of his earlier Argentinian productions. If you know who Roger Corman is, then you might be familiar with the quality of many of his produced films. His name has been attached to many, many cheap genre films which are often very fun in the campiest of ways. Barbarian Queen is no exception to that rule.

Barbarian Queen is a story about revenge. In a small barbarian village, Queen Amethea is getting prepared to be wed to Prince Argan. Then, in a plot point that seems to happen in most of these types of movies including Conan the Barbarian, a troop of fighters led by the nefarious Lord Arrakur invades the village. Nearly everyone is either killed or taken prisoner, and the entire village is burned to the ground. Amethea manages to survive and avoid capture, and she and a handful of other female barbarians set out to rescue the remainder of their village including Argan and Taramis, Amethea’s younger sister. 

What starts out as a fun adventure movie with Amethea and her crew slaughtering bad guys in bloody fashion turns into almost a women-in-prison film. Amethea and her companions are captured after sneaking into Arrakur’s city, and they end up getting entangled with a plot to overthrow the evil leader. How that mostly plays out though is through threats, arguing, and torture. Amethea has to find a way to escape imprisonment which leads up to the climactic final battle with Arrakur and his forces.

For its cheesiness and trashiness, I enjoyed Barbarian Queen. I would have preferred more fighting in the middle parts of the movie, but the movie is only about 70 minutes long, and I was never bored throughout the run-time. This is one of those movies where the director found every opportunity to remove people’s clothing, and I can imagine, for that reason more than most, this was a decent money-maker back in the days of VHS. For someone watching it today, it was a light and easy viewing, but there are many movies just like it out there. Barbarian Queen didn’t really stand out, and I probably won’t revisit it any time soon, but I enjoyed it for what it is. That said, the best part of the movie is absolutely the poster.

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