Diamond Cartel

I love this movie. It’s not good but that’s not the point. The point is that in 2017, you can still get some big stars to act in your shit movie, pay them fuck all, and bomb at the box office.

The plot is pretty basic. There is a main bad guy and he wants to buy a diamond from another bad guy and the main guy’s workers plot to steal it and fuck ’em both over. The big names are in it for a good two minutes. Bolo Yeung from Bloodsport, Shang Tsung, Michael Madson, my favourite geriatric Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson and Tommy Lister from Star Gate. The main bad guy was played by Armand Assante. This fucking guy knocked it out of the park. What a great performance. He was bad ass and convincing. Then there was a cameo from Peter ‘o Toole. Who was so old that he died a few days after this movie was made.

This movie costs $7m and was made in Kazakhstan. It’s not good. The acting is mostly shit, the story is the best that a Kazakh person could do. The camera work was good and so was the editing. I don’t remember any music or sound effects. But we had fun watching it. You would have fun too.

The Wicker Man

Do you think movie remakes are better than the original? You would think that after 33 years, there would be more people around that know how to make better movies. Nope. 2006’s The Wicker Man is a remake of the 1973 Christopher Lee movie and it’s 25 minutes longer. But the IMDB scores are 3.7 for the new one and 7.6 for the old one. So what went wrong?

The short summary of this movie is that there is this island somewhere in the UK with a bunch of weirdo people that are part of some cult that manage to lure in a person from the mainland and then sacrifice him. They lure him using a convoluted plot of having some young girl mysteriously disappear and he investigates and interacts with all the islanders and they all have to play there part in the plot.

The original movie wasn’t a fast paced thriller. For the first half of the movie, the cop is walking around the stupid island and talking to the stupid people. The new movie adds 25 more minutes to give the cop, who will be the guy lured, a motivation to go to the island. After that its beat for beat. They don’t improve the story to give us a reason to care about the islanders. Why are they there? Why did they make a cult? We are told that they know about the mainland, yet they chose the island? Whats so good about the island and the cult that they don’t just leave and join the world? A good conflict should make you care about the good guy and the bad guy. You want to be able to understand how they got to where they are and you’re on the edge of your seat because you don’t know how it will end. This movie does none of that. You have a bad guy because he is a bad guy.

They do change some of the character names and genders. Not because it makes the movie more modern or interesting, but its probably to avoid legal problems. I can’t think that they spent 10 minutes debating the benefits of changing the missing mcguffin girl from Rowan Morrison to Rowan Woodward. Maybe it was because they shot it in USA and couldn’t bother to find British sounding actors. The original was a British island. This one was just some island.

The rest of the movie is pretty shit. This was our first Nicholas Cage movie in the Bad Movie Night and my god his acting is shit. 2006 was the somewhere in the years where he made like a million movies a week and didn’t care about acting. He was just Nic Cage in every movie. He doesn’t look like a guy with a drug habit. So either he’s a bad gambler or he’s bad with economics. The rest of the cast doesn’t stand out either. But that’s not their fault. The script and editing was really shit and did them no favours.

Why do people remake a good movie only to make a worse version? The writer and director is Neil Labute and IMDB says he directed a bunch of shorts and some good movies early in his career. What the fuck was he thinking during this movie? I don’t know. Maybe he had to pay off his gambling debt. He costs the funders $42m to make it and it only brought in $11m.

This movie isn’t even a ‘so bad its good’ movie. Don’t watch it.

Jurassic Prey

What do you do if you wanted to make a movie about bears but then ran of money to buy a bear costume? You CGI in a shitty dinosaur.

It’s 2015 and the Polonia brothers think they they are the new Asylum Production Company. They’re cranking out shark and prey straight-to-video movies at a rate of one every month. They dont have time to care about budgets, story, continuity, actors, props, scripts, or cgi models that match the costume that they rented.

Jurassic Prey is about this woman that withdraws money form a bank and plans to run away. At the same time, there is a bank robbery by three of the dumbest criminals on the planet. Their car doesn’t start and they decide to hijack the woman. She declines and then offers to be their getaway driver. She drives them to some someone’s cabin in the woods. At the cabin, there is an animal that walks on pathways and if it encounters another person on the path, they don’t hear it and it kills them. This animal is referred to as a bear throughout the movie. But every visual of the animal is a dinosaur that is away from people or in the distance. There are scenes where they get an actor to act like he’s fighting something and the producers just superimpose a shitty dinosaur on the image. That CGI dinosaur looks completely different to the costume. I think there were two different CGI models that played the same character.

The woman tries to escape the hijackers and random scenes happen and everyone but the main woman dies from bear attacks. There are some funny deaths. One memorable death was a decapitation. One of the hijackers wears a hat and sunglasses throughout the movie so that when they show his head, they can put the hat and sunglasses on it and the audience won’t be the wiser.

This movie is awful. Do not watch it.

Nukie

Nukie is so bad that it’s the sole reason that Namibia is not a Singapore of Africa.

Back in the 80’s, it was a running joke that Africa is 5 years behind America. This is the case that proves it. E.T. was a big hit in 1982, and someone from Namibia saw it in 1987 and thought that he will make a few bucks from a rip off of it by making Nukie. There were two directors. Neither of them made anything good. One of them didn’t even make anything else.

This movie is so bad. There is nothing redeeming about it. Bad effects, bad dialogue, bad story, bad audio, bad acting. There was one shot where the camera was in focus.

Nukie is about two objects of energy that are traveling in space and, for no reason, they crash into earth. Space is a pretty big place. They are childlike so that means that their parents should be arrested for losing them. These two objects are called Nukie and Meeko. Nukie crashes in Africa and Meeko crashes into the USA. For some reason the USA military are able to detect it, capture it and run experiments on it. The scientists say that its not made of organic matter but then do organic matter experiments on it. Obviously the writers of this movie have brain damage. Then Nukie walks around a bush in Africa and talks to animals. They obviously don’t talk back because they are just animals. Then some humans meet him and want to shoot him using an arrow. Nukie can teleport or turn back into energy and fly around. This is an important fact because it means that they both could have turned back into energy and go back to space. Oh, they are originally a ball of light and then on the earth surface, they look like a deformed potato with a really runny nose.

so this movie could have ended in about a few seconds if it used logic. But no. Its 90 minutes long. For some reason, there is a hunter that wants to kill Nukie. For some reason, there are some kids that want to protect Nukie. For some reason, Nukie and Meeko can communicate. For some reason, Nukie runs from the hunter instead of flying. For some reason, Nukie and Meeko are reunited. For some reason, they take a chimpanzee with them

Do not ever watch this movie. Its retarded and the writers had brain damage.

American Ninja 4

AMERICAN NINJA 4: THE ANNIHALATION, Jody Abrahams (standing left), seated from left: Michael Dudikoff, Ken Gampu, 1990, © Cannon Films

Ok. I watched this alone and it wasn’t as entertaining as it would be with other brain damaged friends.

Nothing makes any sense in this movie. There is the main guy, Bradley, from American Ninja 3 that almost immediately gets captured by the bad guy and is stuck in prison the whole movie. Then Dudikov, the main guy in American Ninja 1 and 2, only appears about 50 minutes into the movie. Naturally he saves the day on his own. The plot about Bradley is of no consequence. But who cares? Nothing makes sense.

The bad guy is an Arab guy that doesn’t talk or look like an Arab. Obviously he is a terrorist. He owns a crew of ninjas and they do terrorist things in some fictional country that supposed to be based in Africa. He trains his ninjas all the damn time. Part of the training is the event called death where you can easily die when doing a regular chop maneuver. So why would the Arab want his own men to die for no reason? Who knows? Nothing makes any sense. He makes them dress up in different colour ninja uniforms for no reason. They also happen to own a prison and captured 4 people recently. Who knows what they were doing up to now.

For no reason there is a bunch of S&M hoodlums that live in a quarry with shitty cars. Like Mad Max. They get some random kid to find Dudikov and he must lead them to fight the bad guys. There was no explanation of why they have beef with the Arab or the ninjas. No explanation of why Dudikov was their main guy and why Dudi needs to help them. He was (badly) teaching kids English in some nearby African country.

All weapons were obvious bad props. The stick were made from paper towel rolls that were sprayed silver. You could see the diagonal lines where the roll joins itself. Then there was a guy with a thick club. It was floppy and had the same diameter of a pool noodle. I wonder how they made that prop?

Most of the scenes where: someone searching for someone else and encountering an enemy while doing it. Nothing that anyone does is of any consequence to the other teams. Why was this movie even made? I took $300k USD. Who knows the budget? Dudikov was popular and probably expensive. They saved a bit by not having Jackson. He was my favourite character in the series. Always kicking ass. They probably saved a ton of money by doing everything in one take. You know its one take when the actor forgets his line and they leave it in. They didn’t need to make this because there is no continuation of the series or build up to a grand finale. They’re basically the same movie as American Ninja 1 but with a different background and a slightly different cast and script. Maybe the script is identical and no one noticed.

So. I don’t know why it was made, but I know for sure that no one should watch this.

Tiger Claws 2

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30 seconds of establishing shots, 30 seconds of line delivery, rinse, repeat.

1996’s Tiger Claws 2 is a celebration of bad editing. It’s about some cop in New York that hears of murders in San Francisco where the bodies has claw marks. He knows about the murderer because he was the arresting cop. The murderer is found to have been broken out from jail. So the cop is now going to SF.

The guy that broke the murderer out is some rich crime boss and he wants to open up a portal to some place. Obviously, the only way to open the portal is to stage a martial arts tournament in the parking lot of his restaurant. Also, all the participants are his soldiers. Also, they will have a final fight with the murderer.

The murderer is played by Bolo Yeung. He’s the massive asian bad guy in the final fight of Blood Sport. He must have been paid by the word because he was quiet throughout the movie and had a terrible display of action at the end. This must have been shot during his holiday in SF. According to IMDB he was the main bad guy too in Tiger Claws 1. This is probably the tale of how the cop first arrested him.

So the plot is pretty thin and the acting is terrible and editing is awful. Why was this made? Cynthia Rothrock is the lead but she pretty forgettable in the role. I was expecting and epic fight between her and Bolo but it wasn’t going to happen. She was also the lead in the first movie, maybe it was done there. So it’s not to display the fighting ability, no data on revenue and it didn’t look like they were closing plot holes of the first movie, even thought I didn’t see the first movie. I don’t know why this movie exists. I might be that it was very cheap to make. Like if they paid the actors during the first movie and they get two sequels for free. It would explain why they have so little footage and script and padded it out with establishing shots. But this is just my guess. I’m sure there’s a better story.

The Bye Bye Man

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Nothing can prepare you for how bad this movie is.

The Bye Bye Man is about a ghost-like guy called The Bye Bye Man. That kills people that say his name. Why? If he was good at killing, there would eventually not be anyone that knows his name and he would cease to exist. Also, why does a living person saying your name mean that you have to kill that person? What does it mean for you that someone says it?

Throughout the movie we’re never told about the backstory of Bye Bye. I don’t understand his motivation to kill. He doesn’t do anything to the bodies and it is of no consequence to him whether or not someone is dead or alive. And another thing, his name, The Bye Bye Man? That is the least scary name every made for a ghost. Its like a child came up with the name and the writer stuck with it. Then there are scenes about trains and his ghost dog that doesn’t have skin. I don’t know why they are there. They do nothing.

This movie was made in 2017 and I thought we’ve come far in quality of movies. Obviously I’m wrong. Everything was terrible in this movie. Acting, cast, script, scenes, editing, sound, you name it. I’m pretty sure some scenes were out of focus but hopefully it was intentional. You would think it was a commercial failure, but no, it made money. Probably watched by stupid kids. $7m budget and $22m earnings. Greedy cash grab. I hope more shit movies are made like this so it drowns out the market.

The movie starts with some guy shooting up his friends and family because he told them the name of Bye Bye. So if you kill them, Bye Bye doesn’t kill them? How is he making the situation better? He might as well just do nothing. Bye Bye will still kill them. This was about 5 minutes into the movie where the premise broke beyond repair.

Now in present day, this group of three students rent some shitty apartment near their school. They go about the usual motions and tropes like random noises, jump scares, summoning the dead, you know, horror movie shit. So now the three people and some random friend all know the name. For some reason, they hallucinate that the other friend is doing something out of character and for no reason, they believe it. About half way in, Bye Bye appears. So you know he has arrived. Why didn’t he kill everyone right there and then? Why does he feel the need to disappear when someone turns on a light or has a friend entering the room? Bye Bye supposed to kill everyone right? What a shitty bad guy.

Among the three friends, one of them was a girl that was British that tried to play an American. Obviously, she’s not very good at it. For no reason, Bye Bye’s effect on her is to make her sick in addition to hallucinate. The others are left healthy but she just coughs throughout the movie. They don’t do anything with this sub-plot. She just coughs and thats that.

There’s one scene where the new friend, the one that summoned the dead, ran across railway tracks and got hit by a train. One of the protagonists liked her and was with the police to give a statement. Carrie Anne Moss, Trinity from The Matrix, is the cop and he hallucinates her winking at him. He should have asked her why is she winking at a time when his girl just died and they are at the scene of the death. Nope, he winks back. Trinity doesn’t know that he is hallucinating and she’s taken aback.

I could go on and on about how every scene doesn’t make sense in our world and the world that was created by the premise. But I’ll stop here. There is nothing good about this movie.

Dragon Ball Evolution

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I’d rather watch 10 hours of animated Goku screaming while powering up.

The great failure of 2009 was this movie. It made $9m from a budget of $30m. It’s about a bad guy named Piccolo that wants to collect six dragon balls so he can use the one wish to take over the world. Goku is the good guy and he already has one Dragon Ball and needs to collect them all before Piccolo. Goku teams up with some girls and his grandfather to find them. Goku is a teenager and will need to do a lot of growing up to train and figure out his power to beat Piccolo in the final battle.

The guy that wrote the Dragonball manga hated this movie. So did the guy that played Piccolo. The screenplay guy got death threats. This is all due to the fact that the movie heavily adapts the cartoon to make it into a movie for America. Fuck yeah. The actress that plays Bulma was dubbed by some random girl. Same with Yamcha.

It starts with a green screen training fight between Goku and his grandfather. Most of the movie will be done with a green screen. Then we get to see him almost-fighting school bullies and almost-befriending a crush. The acting is awkward and terrible in everything.

Piccolo acts like a regular bad guy with a single motivation. But in the cartoon he starts off as Goku’s friend and is a complicated character. So in the movie, Piccolo, crushes Goku’s house and the grandfather inside dies. More bad reaction acting by Goku. Goku finds Master Roshi, played by Chow Yun Fat, that good main actor from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. They do a training fight but it looks like a regular training practice played back at double the speed. He tries to teach Goku about fire bending. This is not something from the cartoons. I think the director tried to beat M Night Shyamalan to the punch because M Night was going to release The Last Airbender in 2010.

Ok. Fuck it. I’m done. There’s a million more things wrong with this movie. But I don’t care. And neither should you.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

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So you’ve got a franchise that started out great and got shitty as the sequels rolled in, so what do you do to send it off? Yes, make another shitty sequel.

Ok. This one isn’t as bad as the 2012 one where they’re on a ship and all the bad guys and their dogs make their mouths open to release a CGI venus fly trap.

After five movies, most of the world is dead. I don’t know why the Umbrella corp is still bent on making a virus and worried about making money. Money doesn’t even matter at that point. I don’t remember anything about this movie but IMDB tells me that Alice (Mila Jovovich) goes back to Racoon City where the Corp is planning a final assault on people. Why? Now that 99.9% of humans are dead, does anything matter? Thankfully, sanity prevails and this movie failed. It costs $40m and made $26m.

Anyways, it was shot in South Africa but there are only two shots that are recognizable. The opening with Table Mountain and a scene that looks like, Ponte Tower, a distinct apartment block in Johannesburg.

The only thing I remember about this film is that there was a lot of shakey camera work. There might have been good fight scenes, which was 90% of this movie, but we didn’t see any of it. Shake shake shake. It didn’t stop.

Don’t waste your time with this shit.

Kill Squad

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This movie is fucking awesome baby!

There is this guy that owns ‘business’ and he is being shaken down so he is shot and his wife is raped and killed. So he goes to some guy for help. The guy calls his Vietnam buddies to help fuck up the bad guys. There are six vet buddies and they start to rally together by collecting each other one by one. As they find their friend, the friend is busy with a small battle with pimps or crooks or some or other hoodlum. Its hilarious.

This movie was 90 minutes and is mathematically perfect. The first 30 minutes sets up the plot of the businessman, the bad guys and the guy that will organise the squad. The best line is used to get the guys to join: “Joseph needs you”. The next 30 minutes is about the squad coming together and doing random fights while they’re doing the collecting. Then the last 30 minutes is about them chasing the bad guy and the henchman and dying off. They die in the order they were collected.

Cameron Mitchell is in this movie and is the main bad guy. He’s somewhat sober and hasn’t turned into the drunk as he is 7 years later in Terror in Beverly Hills.

So why was this movie made? The writer and director is Patrick Donahue and this seems to be his first time at acting, writing and directing. He loves Bruce Lee kung fu movies apparently.

Do yourself a favour and watch this movie. It’s awesome!