Cowboys and Dinosaurs: A tribute to The Valley of Gwangi

A new trailer for you

It seems as though I'm always a bit behind the curve. By the time I'm putting a trailer up, it's usually been floating around for days and it's not really new and exciting anymore. The new trailer smell has worn off, so to speak.

Of course, that doesn't stop me, does it?

Hell no!



So, there you have it. The trailer for Neil Marshall's new movie, Doomsday. Neil Marshall, of course, the director of both Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Both were excellent movies, so I can't help but be excited about Doomsday...there's a sentence I never thought I'd say.

Happy Birthday 7 Dollar Popcorn!

January 10th marked the 2nd birthday of 7 Dollar Popcorn, do you know what that means? It means that, once again, I completely forgot about it. I had such lofty plans, too.

There'd be a cake.


And all of our friends would be there...


It would have been so much fun! We'd play pin the tail on the donkey. Watch some movies of course. It would have been great! But, of course, eventually the cake would run out...


Maybe not having a party was the right idea. Oh well, maybe next year!

Great Movie Gadgets Part 2: Attack of the Sabretooth

All I know is that I want my file transfers to look like this.

Some weird little girl throwing files into a folder. Is that some custom Linux file transfer? That doesn't looks like anything I've seen in Ubuntu...

FGFC: Did she have to crush the bat?

It's no secret that taste is subjective. As they say, one man's garbage is another man's treasure. So it is too with movies. One man's favorite giant monster movie is another man's low budget, unwatchable exercise in futility. And, one movie fan's masterpiece is another ploddingly slow waste of two hours.

I'm not here to say that this month's Final Girl Film Club choice was 'a ploddingly slow waste of two hours'. No, not at all. In fact, speaking only as a fan of cinema, Suspiria is quite a good movie. It is not, however, my kind of movie.

Suspiria is, at it's heart, a fairy tale. Like Snow White, Suzy is on a quest to lose her innocence. No, not that innocence, the other kind. You know, the naivety about the world and how it works. And in much the same way that Snow White had to defeat her evil stepmother, who is herself something of a witch. And, in much the same way, Suzy must face off against the evil headmistress of her dance academy, who is also a witch.

Suzy lands in Germany and, upon passing through the doors of the airport, is hit with a gust of wind as though to show that she has been swept away into a new world. So, maybe this is more like Oz, and the headmistress is the Wicked Witch of the West.

Suzy finds herself in a world of captivating and dizzying color. Color permeates everything in a nightmarishly dreamlike way. So, maybe it's more like Alice falling through the rabbit hole.

I could sit here and do this all day and never pin it down. No, Suspiria is it's own story. While it draws, thematically, from other fairy tales, it is doing a disservice to the film and it's makers to write it off as simply a rehash of the familiar stories that came before it. The story is simple enough. Suzy must leave home to join a dance academy. She arrives the same night that another student is murdered. And, though she doesn't know it, Suzy must stop those responsible before they can do the same to her.

Also, she must speak with Udo Kier.


The first thing that the viewer notices is the over abundance of color. Every frame is so saturated by colors as to become unreal. It fixates the eye upon the screen and leaves the mind a bit uneased. It gives every things a fantastical feeling. Dreamlike. Nightmarish. It's too much, in a way, for the mind to take in. It becomes almost haunting in it's beauty.

Just like Udo Kier.
The framing and composition of each shot is amazing as well. Every shot looks like a masterpiece. Faces and bodies placed in perfect compliment or contrast to the scenery around them. At one point, after speaking with Udo Kier, Suzy has a chat with an authority on witchcraft. The scene is shown, partially, in a reflection in the glass behind them. In the reflection you see two of each character as if to imply that a choice needs to be made. A fork in the road. To believe in the fantastic story of witchcraft, or to stay in the rational world where that sort of thing can't exist. The next shot is the professor's head, shown at an upward angle against a blue sky. The upward angle tells us, off hand, of his position of authority. Suzy believes what he is saying. That his head is juxtaposed against the blue sky tells us that his head is in the clouds. Therefore, without being told so explicitly, we know that Suzy has made the choice to believe the professor's story about witches and covens.

I think that, as a fan of the cinematic art, it is hard to find fault with Suspiria. From a taste standpoint, however, it is much easier. This is where we get back to the subjectivity of taste. While I can't say that Suspiria was bad, or even unenjoyable, it certainly was not something I would seek out to watch on my own. The deaths were drawn out in a way as to border on annoying (not annoying like your little brother, just, I don't know...cringe-worthy. It was just over done, and from my understanding of Italian horror, this was probably quite tame. Let's just say I don't need gruesomeness and gore to be scared. What's implied is scarier than what's seen...) and there were large chunks of the movie where absolutely nothing was happening other than the images looking nice on the screen. That's why I do the FGFC posts though, isn't it? To watch things I wouldn't normally watch? Movies like The Initiation or The Hand?

Hmm...maybe that's what was missing for me...a 'the' in the title. Regardless, the cinematic art fan in my gives Suspiria a 9, the rest of me however gives it 7 nooses around the neck of dead dancers as they're dropped through a glass ceiling out of 10.

NOTE: Yes, I know. This marks the first (and thus far) only time a movie has received 2 scores. Marvel at the ambiguity....and Udo Kier.

Analyzing Star Wars: Boba Fett

Can someone please explain to me the love affair with Boba Fett? What is it about him that makes so many Star Wars fans cream their pants over him?

Boba Fett plays a minor role in The Empire Strikes Back. It's a pivotal role, no doubt. He is the one who manages to follow Han Solo. What did he really do though? He didn't out think Solo. He didn't capture Solo. All he did was tell Vader where to find him.

If Fett is such a bad ass, why did he need Vader's help to capture Solo? And don't tell me he didn't need Vader. If Fett had been able to capture Solo on his own, he wouldn't have bothered working for the Empire. He would have taken Solo to Jabba the Hutt in the first fucking place. No, Fett was just another pansy ass servant. Just like Vader was subservient to Emperor Palpatine, Boba Fett bowed to Vader.

Fett has 3 whole lines in Empire. In all of them, you see that he knows his place. Never does he argue with Vader. He either submits outright or raises an objection only to be placated by Vader.

Darth Vader: There will be a substantial reward for the one who finds the Millennium Falcon. You are free to use any methods necessary, but I want them alive. No disintegrations.
Boba Fett: As you wish.

Darth Vader: You may take Captain Solo to Jabba the Hutt after I have Skywalker.
Boba Fett: He's no good to me dead.
Darth Vader: He will not be permanently damaged.

Boba Fett: What if he doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me.
Darth Vader: The Empire will compensate you, if he dies. Put him in.

You can almost hear Vader rolling his eyes every time Fett bothers to speak. But, he does end up with Solo in his clutches, flying his ship to Tatooine to make his delivery to Jabba (who refused to tip because Solo was cold! HAHAHAAHA!! Get it? He was FROZEN in carbonite!). So, again, I will admit that Fett was important to the story of Empire. I'm not debating that. I want to know why so many seem to adore him.

Lets look at his role in Return of the Jedi. Here we see Fett has not only delivered Solo, he's also decided to stick around for a while. Obviously this implies that Fett is unemployed. Truly, a sad state of affairs, but who wants to trust a bounty hunter who kow tows to the Empire? You hire Fett only to find that suddenly the Empire is all up in your shit. Not cool. So, the unemployed Fett hangs out on Tatooine long enough to see some bounty hunter he's never heard of bring in Chewbacca. This has to be, initially, quite insulting. Sure, he brought in Solo, but he failed to get the Wookie.

And if that weren't embarrassing enough...a blind man knocked him into the mouth of the sarlaac. Boba Fett died in the stomach of a stationary creature. And to those of you who would argue that 'he survives in the books' I say 'Fuck you and your dumb ass books'. The Emperor cloned himself in the books too. Big fucking deal. No, we'll stick with what happened in the movies, thank you very much. George Lucas has made enough changes to these movies over the years that I think we can assume that if Fett had survived, it's be in the movie. Fett's dead. He died, screaming like a little girl, as he fell into a hole in the sand.


But, that's okay, you hold onto your little anti-hero worship. Just know this...everything Lucas did to emasculate Vader in Episode 1, he did to Fett in Episode II. I know, you'd rather forget the why little brat crying with his dad's head in his hands. All he could do is cheer his father on from the sidelines. Sure, maybe he could pilot a ship (so long as he didn't have to worry about any gas/brake/clutch pedals). So what though? So could Anakin at that age, and Anakin stopped destroyed an entire droid army as a result.


And think about this, do you think that Lucas would bother with action figures for all the no-name background character if Boba Fett figures hadn't flown off the shelves? No. Of course not. The nerds made a minor character popular and have paid the price for that for 30 years. Way to go nerds. Serves you right.

Just keep throwing your money away on merchandise for a bounty hunter who doesn't even deserve it. Me? I'll stick with the real badass...IG-88.

Because nothing says badass like a killer robot.

Attack of the Terrible Graphics

Let's let it be known first that I LIKED Attack of the Sabretooth. It was no Octopus 2 or Raging Sharks, but it was a fun movie to watch. I'm not here to review it though. I don't care about that right now. What I want is to take a look at some of the effects. In fact, I want to take a look at the CGI overall.

For the most part, it was really well done. This was a very low budget film that still managed to produce a CGI sabretooth that looked good.


The eyes look a little lifeless, but overall, it's a damn good looking CGI creature. The sabretooths did look good. There's no denying that. However, the issue is with the sequence at the end.

This is the 'statue' atop the building. Notice that the graphics look like something out of an original Playstation game.


Yeah...it looks even better in the same shot as a person. I've seen animatics that looked better. In fact, that's what this looks like to me. It looks like a rough idea of what it was going to look like that never got finished. It's inexcusable after how good the sabretooths looked for them to have something this blatantly bad in the movie.