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Here are the entries that were added in May:

CATEGORY 7: The End of the World
(2005 - for TV) dir: Dick Lowry; w/ Gina Gershon, Cameron Daddo, Shannen Doherty, (bits for James Brolin, Robert Wagner, Tom Skerritt).
Superstorms continue to peel chunks out of the planet and then zero in on D.C.; meanwhile, the discredited scientist... yeah, well, you know -- the utterly vapid characters go through all the same motions they always do in these movies. The script, aside from being the sort of thin-blooded family-safe drivel you might expect, is also dumber than a coprolite. But working to save the flick is a decent cast and some good photography and effects work, and quite a lot of action to keep things moving, even if they do have to toss in loopy televangelists and crooked politicians. So long as you don't expect it to be any deeper than a coffee stain, it's a right giggle.

 

CHROME AND HOT LEATHER
(1971) dir: Lee Frost; w/ William Smith, Tony Young, Michael Haynes, Peter Brown, Marvin Gaye. No skin; no nothing.
The cycle gang done killed the Green Beret's girl -- that was dumb. What's even dumber is that there is almost no action in this flick. A couple of guys sort of get beat up a little, and that's pretty much it. William Smith's moody performance is good but entirely out of place, as it's difficult to tell the rest of the cast from the wallpaper. It's a bloodless, gutless, wimp-out of a biker movie. Uniquely sad, that.

 

FIDO
(2006 - Canada) dir:Andrew Currie; w/ Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, K'Sun Ray. No skin; no gore.
When the zombie holocaust came... we just domesticated them and used them for slave labor and household servants. But in one sleepy little town, a misfit boy and a neglected wife discover the humanity in the undead. It combines Father Knows Best with Night of the Living Dead -- and while the cast is terrific and the flick is fun to watch, I have to admit I'm disappointed. Considering the subject matter, it's a remarkably mundane comedy with no hard edges and only mild chuckles. Even the "dark" humor comes off as oddly light. They perhaps succeeded too well in recreating the late-fifties family sitcom -- pleasant but vacuous.

 

the FLYING SERPENT
(1946 - aka Killer With Wings) dir: Sherman Scott (aka Sam Newfield); w/ George Zucco, Ralph Lewis, Hope Kramer, Eddie Acuff.
A crazed archaeologist discovers Aztec gold in New Mexico and sics his pet Quetzalcoatl on anyone who gets close -- then a slick mystery writer moves in and tries to pin him for the crimes. Poverty row studio PRC recycles the Devil Bat shtick, combining a monster flick with a murder yarn using a simple and clumsy script featuring equally simple and clumsy characters. It's a weak production with a barely adequate cast and a sad little stuffed monster -- kind of cute if you like such things, but it's the sort of flick that seems designed for instant obscurity.

 

INSECTICIDAL
(2005 - Canada) prod & dir: Jeffery Lando; w/ Meghan Heffern, Rhonda Dent, Samantha McLeod, Vicky Huang. A little skin; a little gore.
The girl-geek's experiments get out of hand and now there's big bugs chewing on the sorority sisters! Cheap CG critters, a hare-brained script, and crappy editing are not a good start. But the film at least partially redeems itself by keeping up a very good pace and never taking itself at all seriously. If you keep your expectations low, it is moderately amusing... not that anyone should go out of their way to see it, really.

 

MAMMOTH
(2006 - for TV) dir: Tim Cox; w/ Vincent Ventresca, Summer Glau, Leila Arcieri, Tom Skerritt. No skin; no gore.
A message from space reanimates a frozen Woolly Mammoth, so we get an undead heffalump (with the speed & stealth of a ninja) sucking the life-force out of people while the nerdy scientist, tough teen gal, and the Woman in Black try to put it back on ice. I kind of wanted to like this one, but... the attempt to combine campy-comedy with monster-horror (and as many asides to old monster flicks as they could squeeze in) all falls so flat, an ant wouldn't trip over it. Not that it's bad, really -- it just leaves an impression that vanishes before the end credits are done rolling.

 

the MINI-SKIRT MOB
(1968) prod & dir: Maury Dexter; w/ Jeremy Slate, Diane McBain, Sherry Jackson, Ross Hagen, Harry Dean Stanton. No skin; no brains.
Rodeo cowboys on motorcycles -- um, okay -- anyhow, the mean bitch with the big hair and bigger eyelashes terrorizes an old flame who got hitched to someone else. They sort of dance rebelliously to sappy music and then they are sort of mean to people, kind of. Urk... they try to play this one tough, but the characters here couldn't be any less "gritty & authentic" if they had all been Sesame Street characters. It's just a lukewarm and woefully untalented dishrag of a movie. If you were at the drive-in with a hot date and not actually looking at the screen at all, it might be tolerable.

 

SPARTACUS AND THE TEN GLADIATORS
(1964 - Italy) dir: Nick Nostro; w/ Dan Vadis, Helga Liné.
Um, some guys with no shirts bang their swords together -- the mean Roman guy laughs -- some slaves escape -- then they stick in some battle scenes from a bigger film and pretend to have an actual movie. Oog -- the cast is less expressive than hand puppets, the plot is in a coma, the editing (by Bruno Mattei) is done by random splicing, and the audience is asleep. It's not really an awful example of the genre, but there is so little effort put into this one, I wonder if anyone involved was actually aware they were supposed to be making a movie.

 

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copyright © 2007 Bruce V. Edwards