Nope, I guess I didn’t regain the initiative to post semi-comprehensive capsule reviews. So here are micro-notes on movies seen recently.
Show Me the Ghost (2021) – Horror-comedy about boy-girl best friends who rent a suspiciously cheap house and discover that it’s haunted. Exorcism attempts fail consistently, until they finally ask themselves WHY the ghost is there. Fun, with just enough scares to keep it from being kid-friendly.
Route 666 (2001) – Lou Diamond Phillips is a federal agent trying to get a witness to California safely; he tries desert shortcut that’s haunted by the ghosts of his own father and the chain gang he was on when he died. There’s also mystic Indian stuff, too. Not as good as it could have been.
Close Range (2015) – Scott Adkins is an ex-soldier on the wrong side of the law who defends his sister and niece from the cartel that the sister’s husband screwed over. Lots and lots of action, which is why you watch a Scott Adkins movie.
Hell of the Living Dead, aka Night of the Zombies, aka Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980) – Bruno Mattei makes his bid for the title of worst of the Italian hack horror directors. A methhead on crack could have made a more coherent movie.
The Infidel (2010) – Been meaning to watch this for fifteen years. A suburban Muslim in London discovers he was adopted from Jewish parents, right when his son gets engaged to the stepdaughter of a hardline imam. Wackiness ensues. Lots of fun (and lots of F-bombs).
Foggy Mountain (2020) – A Vietnamese underworld fighter tries to retire, but the slimy Big Boss tries to force him back by killing his wife. So the fighter takes the fight to the Big Boss’s hideaway on Foggy Mountain, where the Big Boss also engages in slavery and human trafficking. Too many storylines get thrown at us — stick to the ass-kicking! (Also, the Big Boss could have saved him a lot of trouble by making the Big Reveal 90 minutes ago.)
Space Probe Taurus (1965) – A soap-operaesque B&W sci-fi B-movie so impoverished, they couldn’t afford an eleven-year-old who could have corrected all their bad science. Thank goodness the single eye-candy female (Francine York) about the four-person space capsule was good eye-candy.