Reviews #1

When I guilted Chris and Scott of Stomp Tokyo into letting me do some guest reviews, they eventually hooked me up with one of their subsidiary webmasters, Joe.  Joe needed some reviewing done for his site, Opposable Thumb Films, and I was happy to lend my meagre expertise.  Here are as many links to reviews as the preset format of these free pages will let me fit.

The '80s confection that put Elizabeth Shue on the map, and which was set in Chicago but was shot in Canada.  The big MacGuffin is the big, slant-topped Smurfitt/Stone building that appears everywhere in the movie, but largely from just that one angle.

One of my very favorite movies, largely because of the novelization, which reads like exactly as much of a Doc Savage knock-off as the movie suggests.  I adore it, though, and it's star-studded enough to make any game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon much shorter.

Giant intelligent bats spread a hive virus through other bat populations, requiring super-marksman and opera lover Sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips to combat them with a trusty... oh, who am I kidding?  This is that movie, though.

A '70s Roger Corman cheapie that featured James Cameron as one of the modelmakers and John Boy as the romantic action lead.  This also provided Corman with spaceship footage for an infinite number of godawful cheap sci-fi movies in the future.

A very Canadian vampire tale, with Canadin mobsters led by a very Canadian David Cronenberg.  Fun, if a touch slow in parts for some people.

One of Peter Jackson's earliest movies, and one of my earliest reviews, part of the inaugural "Crazy Baby Month."  Actually, I believe it was the only Crazy Baby Month we ever did.  A fun, if bloody and over the top zombie movie, and one of my more favorite reviews.

Treat Williams really doesn't get enough work for my tastes.  He's got a certain consistent level of good that competes mightily with his consistent level of suck, which appears to be directly connected to his judgment in scripts.  I have always enjoyed him, however, and this film teams him with the hilarious Kevin J. Anderson, going up against some deep-sea beastie that really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in the end.

An early Peter MacNicol movie that really does well by its central monster.  With the exception of a few obvious stop-motion shots, this film has one of the best portrayals of a dragon I've seen -- with '80s technology, no less.  Otherwise, a fairly standard hero's quest.

My first go at a martial arts movie.  Jet Li was and remains a complete bad-ass.  Worth seeing for the beat-down of the arrogant Japanese school while he's in his... what... chauffer's outfit?  That's what it looks like.

As I say in the review, this film made a former co-worker finally realize what it is that people find attractive about Angelina Jolie.  The fact that it has Matthew Lillard as a spastic crack-monkey is just something you have to put up with to get the fun out of the rest of the film.

One of my more favored takes on the vampire mythos, particularly notable for Robert Loggia chewing the scenery as a mob boss and incomplete vampire feeding victim who swiftly adapts to what has happened to him.  Ah, John Landis, what has happened to you since these days?