Pass Thru

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Oh Neil.

Neil Breen is one of our favourite film makers. Every one of his movies entertain us immensely. This is his fourth movie released in 2016. The plot is about a being that comes to earth and fixes up the ills of the world.

You can’t hate Neil’s movies so here are a few things that we love:

  • There is a tiger in some scenes that may or may not have been superimposed from some other stock footage from a completely different looking scene.
  • There is an actress that seems to have been captured by a bad guy and escape a few seconds before. So time travel is possible in this movie.
  • We couldn’t understand what was the motivation of the bad guys.
  • We couldn’t understand what were the situation of the victims that made them a target to bad guys.
  • We couldn’t understand why the bad guys had to shout so loudly at the victims.
  • We couldn’t understand why the bad guys would shoot the victims. Surely you need them alive for some reason?
  • We couldn’t understand how Neil became a god.
  • We couldn’t understand why Neil chose to save these victims.
  • We couldn’t understand why Neil is sometimes dead unless he’s alive.
  • We couldn’t understand why Neil has to go to a rock to disappear. Can’t you just vanish on the spot?.
  • We couldn’t understand why there were so many dead people at the end. Where did they come from?
  • We couldn’t understand why they disappear with strange physics. It’s not a whole body at a time. It’s based on the distance from Neil and the speed at which he walks.
  • We loved the cameo by his denim medals shirt from Double Down.

We loved this movie. And you would too.

Please help Neil make more movies by donating to his project.

After Last Season

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Picture it. 2009. You’re in a recession. You left home to be an actor a year ago and you have become famous yet. What do you do? Act in a B movie.

After Last Season is a sequence of images with an audio track. Calling it a movie would be an insult to movies. I’m not too sure of the plot. There was a doctor with a patient in a device that was called an MRI. Then there was a man and a woman that make sounds with their mouths. There is some computer generated images that are the subject of their exchange. The patient is cured of some ailment that he had. The movie ends.

There’s a lot wrong with this movie. But let me find something good about it.

I can’t find anything good about this movie.

Ok, whats bad? The plot is incoherent. There are non-sequitur scenes. The sets are either made from paper and cardboard or in an abandoned IT store. The shadows are so well defined that I think the director had one massive spot light. Many spot lights would have created multiple shadows. But the picture is dim even with such a hard shadow. The sets were in empty rooms so the sound kept bouncing around and made the dialogue almost incoherent. Not that it matters. The dialogue was so bad that we didn’t think that they had the same script. The camera work was just just as bad. Every frame was shot from far because the director only had one camera. And even then, some scenes wobbled and every shot was skew. So we figured that he didn’t have a tripod too.

No movie made us question what was going on as often as this movie. If you watch this movie, you’re doing to to either laugh at the extremely unskilled way making a product, or you’re a film student and you need to know what not to do.

Watch it. For the laughs.

Message from space: Galactic wars

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What would you do if you had a few hundred substandard crash helmets lying around? Obviously make a B movie that apes Star Wars and Power Rangers at the same time.

Message from space is a 1978 movie that was produced by a Japanese company and has American actors. The dialogue is also in English and the Japanese actors were dubbed. This movie was made a year after the original Star Wars was released. So you had some of the space fighters, some iconic shots. R2 is actually a BEBA2. A BEBA is a midget in a cardboard costume.

So the plot. There is a bad guy that destroys a planet because his mother wanted it destroyed, for some reason. Then some other guy throws eight walnuts into space so that people can collect them and then return them. Then there is a ship with a crazy passenger and that flies the plane and they are chased by space police for some reason. Then there are these two kitchen cleaners that find two of the nuts and, for no reason, save the galaxy. There are also other characters that do things that I can’t figure out what they have to do with the plot. There is a granny in an electric wheelchair. An old guy that dresses like a bum. People with plastic leaves on their heads. A main emperor samurai guy with a crash helmet and horns on the helmet. An Englishman wearing a colonial shipping uniform. A young girl that like to act crazy.

This is a typical Japanese movie. Its random and nuts and doesn’t make sense. Watch it.

Superman IV: The quest for peace

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90 minutes went by and nothing happened.

1987’s Superman 4 was the brainchild of Canon. Those guys that made all the Deathwishes, Exterminators, van Damme movies, Breakin’, etc. Its all for the money. Who cares about story? Usually movies have three acts, introduction, low point for the lead and victory. These acts are split, usually, evenly in the duration. Not this movie. You have about 60 minutes of act one, 5 minutes of acts two and then 25 minutes of the act three fight. Its all very slow and boring.

The plot is about Lex Luther that escapes prison, steals a thing, puts it in a missile, gets superman to throw all missiles into the sun, Lex’s missile hatches a bad guy, bad guy fights superman and loses.

There is no sub-plot either. We thought it would be that the Daily Planet was bought over by someone. Nope, a line or two. That’s all. Was it the daughter that wanted to band Super? Nope, he cares about his granny too much. His granny was his girlfriend in the previous three movies too. Lois Lane was her name.

There are very long chase scenes in the fight scenes. This is purely for padding. Super could kill the bad guy in seconds. The baddie was also a solar powered guy for some reason. Super had a chance to kill him. He already had the baddie in a box and in space during a time where the Earth blocked the sun. He could just fire bad guy off to space where its darker. Nope. Forget him, sun comes through the gap in the box’s doors, he charges up and repeats another 10 minute fight.

This is a simple good guy vs bad guy movie. But they fail at this plot too. There was no motivation for the bad guy. He hatched in the sun, why did he come to earth? Why did he only take orders from Lex? Why did he not just destroy everything? Why did he have clothes? Why is he angry?

This movie was so bad, it didn’t even make enough money to cover its production budget. About half of the movie had a lazy rear projection. The other half was on a set. The sets looked good. This is probably where the budget went.

Watch this movie because you love to laugh at bad movies.

Hellgate

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If you had a magic crystal, would you turn a goldfish into a monster fish that explodes? Sure you would.

We’re still celebrating bad movies shot in South Africa. This 1989 gem is about some lady that gets murdered. He father finds a crystal that has magic powers. He gives life to her body. Shit happens like a biker gang fight, a gold theme park tour, two couples talk about some story, one guy from the couples falls in love with the zombie lady and animals explode. None of this shit has to do with her father getting revenge.

The first 15 minutes are the best. This is probably where all the budget went. Good props, explosions and makeup. The rest of the movie was shot at night at one house and one petrol station. There is a ghost town with a turtle that bites you and you explode.

The best special effect was the slow motions. Nothing says ‘great movie’ like padding.

Watch this movie. Watch it now!

Out on bail

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Robert Ginty, the most accomplished actor, acts like a mute.

Picture it, 1989 Johannesburg in South Africa. Nelson Mandela is in prison. Leon Schuster is the greatest comedian on earth. And Robert Ginty comes here to star in a Rambo First Blood knock off.

So Ginty is a run of the mill bum and he’s on a train to no where. He gets to his destination, finds a hotel, gets a room, goes to a bar, breaks a drug deal, steals the money, find out the cops are in on the deal, gets chased by the cops, arrested and beaten and then breaks free while killing everyone. Boom! Oh, spoilers.

Most of the movie has Ginty being quiet like Rambo. The only reason we cared about it was that we can abuse Ginty through the screen because his set was in our neighborhood here in Johannesburg. Probably.

The cops are assholes exactly like in Rambo and they act as if they’re in the US. THe IMDB page says that this is based in Tennessee. They tried hard to keep the continuity by getting the US cars and driving them on the wrong side of the road. Some times this continuity breaks when you see stop signs on the correct side of the road and a few South African accents slip in. Loved spottign cameos by South African actors and actresses. Nadia Bilchik was the one I remember. She was a continuity presenter at a local station.

This move was a long 110 minutes and could have had 30 minutes cut out without anyone noticing.

Don’t watch it. Unless you’re being tortured.

Spy Kids 3D: Game Over

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2013 was the year Robert Rodriguez and his jibronies tell the world that they need money.

When you think of Robert Rodriguez you might think of Machete and Desperado and some Grind House shit. Not this Garbage.

Sylvester Stallone is a game maker and he some how made a virtual reality game that sucked up the main guy’s sister. Now main-guy must save her.

The entire movie is done, terribly, in a fucking green screen. You can see it quite clearly. The dialogue is terrible, the clothes, the acting, all of it, just shit.

Luckily it died on us half way.

Not going back.

 

Monolith

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It’s 1993 and Bill Paxton has a mullet and is historical like every other movie. “It’s game over man!”.

Monolith is a generic, boring science fiction movie that is so bad that the producers couldn’t find a better title. There is no actual monolith in this movie. The story is about some spirit. It occupies the body of a kid. Some chick shoots the kid and the spirit waits till there is someone close to the body to transfer itself to that new living body. They run around, he does bad things, he gets shot, transfer.

Louis Gossett Jr plays generic police chief man. John Hurt plays generic FBI cover up man. The partnership between Bill and partner is generic. They start off by fighting and then work well together.

This was like a stretched out version of an X-files episode. Don’t watch this shit.

We watched two Bill Paxton movies to honour him when we heard that he died. Rest in peace Bill Paxton.