FANTASTIC MOVIE TRAILERS HD 2: YOUTUBE BOOGALOO (2016) ***

Here’s another fun trailer compilation from the folks at Montreal Film Studio.  It’s not quite as entertaining as the previous installment, if only because I was a lot more familiar with the films featured in this collection and have seen many of these trailers before.  Then again, I watch an awful lot of these things, so that criticism may not mean much to you if you just want to spend 82 minutes in the presence of some classic grindhouse and exploitation trailers.

The trailers this time around include:  Don’t Answer the Phone, Rolling Thunder, Force:  Five, Teenage Mother (which has one of the greatest taglines of all time:  “Teenage Mother means nine months of trouble!” and it remains one of my favorite trailers, even in its edited form), Black Samson, Argoman the Fantastic Superman, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, The Dungeonmaster, The Babysitter, Hells Angels on Wheels, Amin:  The Rise and Fall, They Call Her One Eye, Black Samurai, The Devil’s Nightmare, Golden Needles, The Undertaker and His Pals, The Pink Angels, Helga (which features a lot of man-on-the-street interviews and like Teenage Mother, promises to show the birth of a real baby), Dark Star, Deadly Blessing, The Italian Stallion, Welcome Home Brother Charles (AKA:  Soul Vengeance), Stunt Rock, Mr. Billion, the immortal trailer for the double feature of Women and Bloody Terror and Night of Bloody Horror (which offers to pay you $2000 if you die of fright while watching it), The Scaremaker, Van Nuys Blvd., Skatetown USA (a repeat trailer from the first volume), The Mutations, They Came from Beyond Space, Wicked Wicked (filmed in “Duovision”), and H.O.T.S. 

I’ve seen many of the movies showcased in this collection (as well as their trailers), so this compilation lacked a bit in the way of discovery for me.  That said, this is a solid collection of trailers (and intermission ads).  There’s a good amount of variety here (although there are a lot of Crown International titles this time out), and it’s certainly never boring, which means any fan of trailer compilations should enjoy it heartily.   

ROCKETMAN (2019) *** ½

Rocketman is an enjoyable, sometimes exhilarating celebration of the life and music of Elton John.  Even for someone like me, who isn’t a huge John fan, it was easy to get swept up in seeing his life portrayed in such a theatrical, over the top manner.  One could criticize the film for being all broad strokes and containing way too many scenes that are on-the-nose.  Then again, no one ever accused Elton John of being subtle. 

The film follows John’s rags to riches story.  He goes from living with an unloving family to being an overnight sensation with legions of adoring fans.  Troubled by unhappy relationships, and his repressed sexuality, he delves deeper and deeper into drug and alcohol abuse. 

The musical numbers aren’t the studio versions you’ve heard on the radio for the past five decades.  Instead, they are done like a musical, with the numbers woven into the narrative.  Taron Egerton is magnetic as John.  More impressive is the fact that he does his own singing.  He doesn’t try to imitate John.  He allows the emotion of the scene to inform his musical performance, which sometimes leads to wildly different interpretations of the songs, but that’s kind of what I liked about it.  Egerton embodies John so well that you often forget you’re watching an imitator. 

Director Dexter (Eddie the Eagle) Fletcher does a fine job on the musical numbers and offers us some truly surreal moments.  My favorite scene is John’s first performance at The Troubadour when the power of his music literally lifts the audience off the ground.  It’s touches like this that help set the film apart from so many other stale biopics.

There are times when Rocketman feels like the It’s a Small World ride set to Elton John music. Some may gripe about the frantic pacing as the narrative sometimes feels like it's rushing from one milestone to the other.  However, the hectic pace highlights the fact John is often a passenger in his own story as he is perpetually imprisoned by his self-loathing, stifling relationships, and drug use.  I’m sure there were more aspects of John’s later life they could’ve translated onscreen, but the film suitably ends when he is finally able to take control of his own story.  There’s something touching and empowering about that. 

FANTASTIC MOVIE TRAILERS HD! (2016) *** ½

2020 hit us all hard.  There’s no real way of escaping it.  We all have our ways of coping to get us through the dark times.  For me, watching compilations of exploitation and grindhouse movies trailers have always been a form of visual comfort food.  There’s no plot to follow.  There’s no attention span required.  Just bite-sized shots of exploitation goodness, great voiceovers, and sleazy tag lines. 

Fantastic Movie Trailers HD! gives us a good mix of exploitation subgenres.  There are a lot of action, horror, blaxploitation, and sexploitation titles, many of which were released by AIP.  Many of the movies featured are bad, but the trailers themselves are often a thing of beauty.  We also get some fun intermission shorts and, strangely, a pocket calculator ad.  (“$345 complete!”)  While I’ve seen a few of these trailers in other compilations, there are a few films here that I never heard of, which is something I always appreciate from a trailer compilation.

The films include:  Mitchell, Super Fuzz, Sister Streetfighter, The Dark, Savage Sisters, Spy in Your Eye, Delinquent Schoolgirls, Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon (“The Edgar Allan Poe film that is so shocking, it will never appear on television!”), Voyage of the Rock Aliens, Sugar Hill, I, a Woman (“In the great tradition of Scandinavian realism!”), Born Losers, Shoot, Ms. .45, Rabid, Force Four (starring Warhawk Tanzania), Matango (“Fear the ogre of death!”), Werewolves on Wheels, Inframan (“6 million light years beyond believability!”), The Guy from Harlem, Mr. No Legs, Thunder Cops, The Bullet Machine, the classic ad for the I Dismember Mama & The Blood Spattered Bride double feature, Skatetown USA (“The greatest story ever rolled!”), Nightmare Honeymoon (“Please don’t see it with someone you love!”), The Crippled Masters, The Teacher, The Evictors, and When Women Had Tails. 

Fantastic Movie Trailers HD! was produced by a Canadian company called Montreal Film Studio.  They’ve released countless trailer compilations on DVD, but this one is available to watch for free on YouTube.  If the selection of trailers on those sets are as good as the ones featured here, I’ll definitely be adding those to my collection sometime soon.  There are two sequels on their YouTube channel as well, and I plan to watch them ASAP.

HEIST SCHOOL (2006) *

I can honestly say I haven’t seen very many Turkish movies.  That’s not a slight against the country or their cinematic output.  It’s just that their films aren’t the sort of things that pop on my radar.  Unless they have Captain America and El Santo teaming up to fight an evil Spider-Man (as was the case with the Turkish classic, 3 Giant Men), I don’t usually intentionally seek out Turkish cinematic delights.

Heist School doesn’t sound like a movie I would watch, even if it was in English.  It’s basically the Turkish version of The Perfect Score.  Five teenagers panic when they learn the government are rolling back college scholarships.  They then set out to steal the answers to a big college entrance exam in order to get accepted to a fancy college.  

Granted, it’s not the worst idea for a movie.  It’s just that it’s extremely slow moving (the long scenes of the kids sitting in class seemingly play out in real time), there’s way too many characters, and the heist scenes lack anything approximating suspense.  The faux film breaks, and random use of filters quickly get annoying too.

Great directors would struggle to keep us engaged for ninety minutes of this.  Unfortunately, this one clocks in at a whopping two hours.  The editor could’ve cut whole chunks out of the picture and no one would’ve noticed.  It also doesn’t help that none of the young performers are particularly likeable or memorable either. 

The only reason I watched Heist School was because Jean-Claude Van Damme was in it.  Unfortunately, you have to wait till the last twenty minutes before he shows up.  He makes a big superstar entrance deboarding a private plane, which makes me think the production company just filmed him arriving at the airport.  Basically, his character, a supposed master criminal who—get this—looks like Jean-Claude Van Damme (that’s the level of humor we’re dealing with here) is only there to help the kids plan their heist and give them a pep talk.  Van Damme does give the movie a brief shot in the arm, but he’s given too little to do in too little time to make much of a difference.  (The lame part where he intimidates a bully is as close as the film comes to having an action scene.)

Awhile back when I was on Ty and Brett’s Comeuppance Podcast, we talked about our Top 5 Best and Worst Van Damme movies.  This would definitely go on my list of Top 5 Worst list.  I guess I could cut it a little slack because it’s not exactly a Van Damme vehicle as his role is little more than an extended cameo.  That said, his participation (however brief) is the sole reason anyone would want to watch it to begin with.  Whenever he isn’t on screen, Heist School flunks out.

NINJA TERMINATOR (1986) ***

Richard Harrison and his two Ninja buddies steal “The Golden Ninja Warrior” (it looks like a fucking paperweight) from their power-hungry master.  They split the golden knickknack into three parts and go their separate ways.  The master then sends out a bunch of Ninjas to get the trinkets back. 

Since this is a Godfrey Ho mix ‘n match movie, there’s another plot from an entirely different film going on.  In this part of the flick, a guy named Jaguar Wong (Jack Lam) goes around Kung Fuing the crap out of anyone who gets in his way.  Eventually, he is also tasked to retrieve the piece of Ninja bric-a-brac.  

Because this is a Ho film, the plot is really secondary, and rarely makes sense.  Ho does deliver on the Ninja action though.  There are scads of scenes of Ninjas hopping around via jump cuts, tossing out Ninja stars, and getting into swordfights.  There’s even a nutty bit where one Ninja shoots flames out of his hands while his rival combats the blast by shooting freezing spray from his fist (it looks like someone stuck a fire extinguisher up his sleeve).    

Lam has plenty of opportunities to kick ass throughout the picture.  He’s always running into guys in parking lots or on top of parking garages who want to kill him for some reason or another and he more than gladly takes them down a peg.  Among Lam’s highlights are the scene where he uses a baseball to beat some thugs up and a part where he fights a guy while keeping his hands in his pockets.

It’s Harrison though who makes the movie.  Whether he’s fighting guys in his camouflage Ninja outfit or saving his girlfriend from a random crab attack, he’s always a blast to watch.  His best scene is when he delivers a stern message while talking on his Garfield phone!  Nothing to me says “deadly Ninja” more than a guy who uses a Garfield phone.  (This scene was so iconic that Ho had Harrison use the phone again in Diamond Ninja Force.) 

God, and I haven’t even mentioned the hilarious sex scene that’s framed so poorly that you can’t tell whose body is whose.  Or that when the woman climaxes, the camera cuts to a blooming flower!  I didn’t even bring up the jaw-dropping scene where a kid’s windup toy robot enters a room under a cloud of ominous smoke to deliver a message from the evil Ninja empire.  Or the villain who wears a hilarious blonde He-Man wig.  

On top of all that, there are even more gratuitous sex scenes, unrelated action, and random fights.  Other subplots that involve drug dealing and torture are also tossed in there, although by that point, the movie has started to feel overcrowded.  I don’t presume to understand what was going on half the time.  Then again, it didn’t really matter when you’re getting three movies for price of one.  Sure, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but let’s face it, you’d be disappointed in a Ho flick if it did.  

Ninja Terminator just may be proof you can have too much of a good thing.  Just when you think it’s over, it keeps going.  Ho pitches the movie at such a frantic rate that it quickly becomes numbing.  Still, with so much awesomeness packed in one place, it’s virtually critic-proof.  You’re either the kind of person who wants to see Ninjas that use Garfield phones, or you aren’t. 

HAVE A GOOD TRIP: ADVENTURES IN PSYCHEDELICS (2020) **

Have a Good Trip:  Adventures in Psychedelics has an interesting premise.  Celebrities (mostly comedians) describe what it was like (for them) to trip on acid and mushrooms.  We then see animated re-enactments and/or live-action recreations of their hallucinations.  While this could’ve been an intriguing look at casual drug use among celebrities, it quickly reveals itself to be a half-baked idea.

The best stuff is the clips from old anti-drug films from the ’60 that occasionally pop up, usually as a counter to what is being said by the celebrities.  Some of the interviews are enlightening.  The scenes with Sting, Carrie Fisher, and Ben Stiller are particularly memorable.  In fact, the film would’ve been fine if it was just the interview segments.  

It’s when the movie goes for cheap laughs that it completely falls on its face.  The scenes of the various trips feel like something from a shitty sketch comedy show.  Nick Offerman’s host segments (which are a parody of the old government films) land with a thud, as do the After School Special parodies starring Adam Scott.  It’s also unfortunate that some of the most entertaining guys (to me at least), like Will Forte, Marc Maron, and Donovan don’t get their own segment and only appear briefly, which is frustrating.  

Ultimately, the big problem with Have a Good Trip:  Adventures in Psychedelics is that it all feels kind of square.  I mean why spend ninety minutes listening to people TALKING about doing drugs when you could go out and do them yourself?  (Please don’t, at least not on my account.)  It’s kind of like being stuck in a room with a hippie.  By about the fourth time you hear, “Hey man, did I ever tell you about this time I was high on acid…”, you start wishing the ‘60s never happened.  

MANOS RETURNS (2018) **

If it wasn’t for Mystery Science Theater 3000, the 1966 low budget horror oddity, Manos:  The Hands of Fate would’ve faded into obscurity.  Thanks to a pair of wisecracking robots, Manos was resurrected and brought back into the pop culture consciousness.  Well, at the very least, the pop culture consciousness of people who like bad movies (like me).  

Manos Returns must set some kind of record for the longest gap between a movie and its sequel, especially for one that stars the same cast members from the original.  (Fifty-two years, to be exact.)  The good news is it looks exactly how you would expect a fifty-plus years later sequel to Manos to look.  It was shot on video, features minimal location work, and is packed to the gills with bad dialogue and amateurish acting.  It also cannily reuses the same music from the first film (including some covers), and recycles a lot of the same dialogue and situations.

I have to admit, it’s a lot of fun seeing the old cast again.  It’s also kind of neat to revisit this world and seeing how things have changed in the years since the original.  Like the old saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. 

This time out, it’s four friends who get lost on the highway during a vacation, instead of a family.  They make a wrong turn and wind up at a rundown old house where they meet the weirdo groundskeeper Torgo (Steven Shields), who “takes care of the place while ‘The Master’ is away”.  Eventually, after a lot of stumbling around the house, the friends find themselves in the grips of the dark power of Manos.

Manos Returns is at its best when its following in the original’s footsteps.  It’s kind of refreshing to see what a halfway capable director (in this case, Tonjia Atomic, who also has a supporting role as one of the Master’s wives) can do with the material as there are moments here when the whole thing threatens to actually work.  (It’s certainly more competent and watchable than the original, that’s for sure.)  It’s less successful however when it's making its own (unfunny) comedic commentary on the proceedings.  There are times when the characters make jokes at the movie’s expense; almost as if they’re trying to beat Mystery Science Theater to the punch.  (There’s even a thinly veiled reference to one of the riffs from the MST3K episode.)  The discussion the characters have about bad movies in the beginning is a bit too on-the-nose too. 

It was good seeing The Master (Tom Neyman) again.  Unfortunately, he died before it was released.  At least he had one more opportunity to wear the Manos robe.  Debbie (Jackey Neyman Jones) and her mother (Diane Mahree Rystad) also make a welcome return, although to say any more about them would get into Spoiler territory.  It must be said that the new Torgo isn’t a patch on John Reynolds’ definitive interpretation of the character in the original film.  I did find it refreshing that the Master added some plus-sized girls to his stable of wives though. 

There are some odd new touches to the Manos lore that feel a bit half-baked, like the lost souls (I think that’s what they are) who are still stuck inside the house.  The ending is okay, I guess, and we get one decent bloody scene.  On the plus side, it’s only an hour long.  I can’t quite call it “good”, but I admire the fact that it knew when to quit. 

Overall, Manos Returns is better than the original.  That wasn’t difficult to do I’m sure, but still.  It may have its share of flaws, but it’s about as good as a fifty-two years later sequel to one of the worst movies of all time could be.