SHAOLIN DRUNKEN MONK (1981) ***

Shaolin Drunken Monk begins with Gordon Lui practicing Kung Fu in front of a waterfall, and more movies should start with Gordon Lui practicing Kung Fu in front of a waterfall, if you ask me.  Anyway, Gordon is a badass who has kidnapped a warlord’s daughter.  Nobody knows his name, so they just call him “The Bald-Headed Man”, which first of all, is rude as Hell.  I for one won’t sit still for any follicle shaming.  So, I say, go get ‘em, Gordon!  Meanwhile, a one-armed guy is running around killing people too. 

Things start off like gangbusters, but the pacing starts to drag once the longwinded flashback that explains everyone’s motivations takes over the narrative.  I’m not saying this stretch of the film is necessarily bad.  It’s just that it lacks the fun of the nonstop scenes of Lui kicking ass.  The tragic out-of-left-field ending doesn’t quite stick the landing, either.  At least the running time is a tight seventy-five minutes. 

Even when the story stalls, there are still plenty of amusing bits to keep you entertained, like when Gordon’s teacher gets him drunk in order to practice drunken Kung Fu or when he uses his martial arts prowess to do the dishes.  The many training montages are also amusing thanks to Lui’s unorthodox fighting methods.  Other highlights include Lui doing battle with a guy who throws a razor-sharp boomerang, the one-armed guy fighting off a bunch of dudes in a restaurant, and a nutty scene where Lui uses a method of karate than can only be described as “Effeminate Fu” to flummox his opponent. 

Gordon also does a badass move where he jumps high in the air, gets into the lotus sitting position in midair, and then lands on the bad guy.  Imagine if Super Mario was a yoga instructor, and that will give you an idea of the level of awesomeness we’re talking about here. All in all, Shaolin Drunken Monk is a fun time.  Any fan of Lui worth their salt ought to check it out. 

AKA:  The 36th Chamber:  The Final Encounter.  AKA:  Kung Fu Warrior.  AKA:  The Drunken Monk.

DETOUR (1999) * ½

Jeff Fahey and James Russo are thieves who are double crossed by sleazy Gary Busey in this dull crime thriller.  Jeff decides to lay low back in his hometown till the heat cools off.  He soon learns his mom died and if he wants a piece of the will, he’s got to make a go at being a dairy farmer.  Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before the gangsters come looking for the loot. 

Directed by Joey Travolta, Detour has a great cast including Michael Madsen, Tim Thomerson, and even Evan Rachel Wood in an early role.  Despite the copious amount of talent involved, it still winds up being a perplexing dud.  I think it would be easy (or just plain lazy) to put the blame on Joey Travolta because… well… he’s Joey Travolta.  However, he’s really not a bad director, as anyone who’s ever seen Hard Vice can attest. 

The big problem is with the screenplay by Raymond Martino and William Stroum, who also wrote To the Limit, the Anna Nicole Smith actioner that also co-starred Travolta.  The screenplay really twiddles its thumbs in the second act.  It’s here where Fahey reconnects with the family and friends he left behind while taking ownership of the family farm.  This is like some shit you’d see on the Great American Family Channel at 2 PM on a Tuesday while waiting in the doctor’s office.  The gratuitous farming montage is especially hard to take, as is the excessive parade footage.  The soundtrack is pretty intrusive too as it goes from hard rock to fake Tom Petty to knock-off Lilith Fair shit, seemingly on a dime.  Things do heat up in the finale when there are shootouts and explosions aplenty, but it’s all wrapped up so abruptly and conveniently that it’ll make your head spin in disbelief. 

The most disappointing thing about Detour is how it manages to waste its cast.  Fahey scowls and cusses, but his character arc is flimsy and predictable.  Madsen isn’t given much to do but act grumpy.  The same can be said for Russo, who’s pretty used to these thankless tough guy roles.  At least Busey seems to be having fun as the crooked money man, although he’s killed off too early to make much of an impression.  Joey was also able to get his sister Ellen to do a cameo.  (I guess John didn’t return his phone calls though.)

AKA:  Roadblock.  AKA:  Too Hard to Die.

OUIJA SHARK 2: OUIJA SHARK VS. TAROT GATOR (2022) **

After a quick wrap-up of the first film, we learn that Anthony, the hero from the first movie (writer/director John Migliore) is now trapped in the afterlife where he routinely gets into Doctor Strange-style magic battles with guys who wear gorilla suits and cheap oversized sunglasses.  Meanwhile, the evil Caldura (Simon Wheeldon) spends his time watching Ouija Shark devour bikini clad women.  Back in the real world, Anthony’s wife, Cressida (Deborah Jayne Reilly Smith) is frantically trying to find a way to bring him back to life.  When Ouija Shark breaks out of the underworld, Anthony must call upon his spirit animal, Tarot Gator to save the world. 

I enjoyed the first Ouija Shark more than anyone with half a brain probably should have.  (I guess it all depends on which half of your brain you’re missing.)  So, I figured I’d give this sequel a go.  I was surprised as anyone to learn about the awesome subtitle, “Ouija Shark vs. Tarot Gator” that pops up in the opening credits sequence as it was definitely not listed as such on any of the streaming sites, or on IMDb for that matter.  Had I known that was indeed the full title, I would’ve watched it much sooner. 

The first one worked because it took the bare bones of your typical shark flick, infused it with your average Ouija movie, and just ran with the goofiness.  This one has an anything goes type of kitchen sink mentality, which is admirable.  It’s just that the misses far outweigh the hits.  It’s one thing when it’s copying Doctor Strange.  It’s another when it’s ripping off Return of the Jedi.  Oh, and did we really need to see the devil guy performing a song and dance number? 

I will say there is a noticeable uptick in fun once Ouija Shark leaves Hell, turns into a kaiju, and stomps on a city.  I just wish it didn’t take so long for Tarot Gator to enter the fracas.  At least their final battle is amusing.  You know, if watching hand puppets shooting fireballs and bolts of lightning at each other is your cup of tea. 

Maybe I’m just a man of simple tastes, but the original worked for me mostly because it had a ghost shark eating babes in bikinis.  Sure, there’s some of that here, but ultimately there’s too much wimpy warlock shit that gets in the way of the fun.  Now that I think of it, a more cohesive plot might’ve helped too.  Not to mention some funny jokes.  Quibbles aside, Ouija Shark 2 is far from the worst shark movie I’ve seen.  That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but for a select few, that will be all you need to hear to check it out. 

SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS (1971) ***

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things is an almost indescribable experience, but I’ll do my best to describe it.  You’d think with a title like that, it would be one of those “hag horror” films like Hush… Hush… Sweet Charlotte or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but you’d be wrong.  It’s more of a gay crime melodrama.  Imagine if Andy Milligan made movies in sunny Miami instead of Staten Island.  That almost does it justice.  Almost. 

Paul (Abe Zwick in his first and last credited role) and Stanley (Wayne Crawford, making his debut) are lovers on the run from the law.  They flee Baltimore and hide out in Miami where Paul dresses up in drag and poses as Stanley’s Aunt Martha.  He also gets extremely agitated whenever Stanley threatens to blow their cover.  As “Aunt Martha”, he wigs out (no pun intended) whenever he catches Stanley making time with women and kills off his prospective lovers.  Tensions begin to boil over when a junkie pal named Hubert (Don Craig) shows up snooping around for the pair’s loot of stolen jewels. 

Very few people were making gay-themed exploitation flicks like this in the early ‘70s.  Heck, I don’t think anyone ever made them quite like this.  (Don’t worry.  There’s a decent amount of female T & A, murder, and gruesome shocks sprinkled about to appease every kind of exploitation fan, regardless of your sexual preference.)  It has an oddball kookiness about it that is hard to deny.  It’s certainly a one-of-a-kind experience, that’s for sure.  This was the first and only directorial effort by Tom Casey, who also wrote the incredible Flesh Feast.  Maybe Casey realized Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things was going to be one tough act to follow so he quit while he was ahead. 

Zwick and Crawford are memorable in the lead roles.  They have a screwy chemistry together and the scenes of them playing house have an off-kilter Odd Couple vibe to them.  Also, be on the lookout for none other than Brad F. (Blood Freak) Grinter and William (Blood Feast) Kerwin, who show up late in the film as detectives. 

AKA:  Damn You, Aunt Martha.  AKA:  Aunt Martha.

GOOD-BYE CRUEL WORLD (1982) *

When I was a kid, the video box for Good-Bye Cruel World scared the shit out of me.  I had no idea what it was about, but the image of a hand coming out of a toilet was enough to instill fear in little Mitchie.  Now that I finally have seen it, the only thing scary about it is how bad it is. 

Good-Bye Cruel World has an admittedly cool gimmick of being filmed in “Choice-A-Rama” where the audience can choose what happens next.  However, it’s all obviously rigged.  While initially amusing, these scenes wear out their welcome fast and eventually reveal their true purpose:  To pad out the running time.  The only good part is when Angelique Pettyjohn performs a striptease dressed as a nun.  Other than that, the gimmick gets old quick. 

Dick (Angel) Shawn is a news anchor who has an on-air breakdown.  He then decides to commit suicide, but before that, he sets out to make a documentary about his life.  Along the way, there are Kentucky Fried Movie-style commercial spoofs (Sledgehammer creator Alan Spencer appears as Norman Bates for “Psycho Soap”), fake movie trailers (An Officer and an Elephant Man), and news reports, most of which are painfully unfunny. 

Directed by David (C.H.U.D. 2:  Bud the C.H.U.D.) Irving, Amy Irving’s brother and Steven Spielberg’s former brother in-law (there’s an E.T. joke), it’s basically a mess from start to finish.  Whenever Shawn’s story threatens to gain any momentum, the Choice-A-Rama guy will pop up or the fake commercials intrude and take the wind out of the movie’s sails.  A funny film could’ve been made about suicide.  (Just watch Burt Reynolds’ The End.)  However, it just seems like all involved didn’t have enough confidence in the material and cheapened everything with all the useless fake commercials instead.  The ending is really stupid too, as it’s a total cop-out, which makes the whole enterprise even more infuriating. 

Co-starring Priscilla Pointer (the director’s mother), Chuck (Porky’s) Mitchell, and Darrell (Men at Work) Larsen as Shawn’s family. 

AKA:  S.L.U.R.P.  AKA:  Up the World.

STAR TREK: SECTION 31 (2025) **

Although I really enjoy the Star Trek movies, I don’t really keep up with the TV shows.  I’ve only seen about half of the original series, a handful of episodes of The Next Generation, some of Enterprise, and absolutely nada of Deep Space Nine.  In fact, since the advent of Paramount+, I hadn’t even bothered keeping up with the (too many) Trek shows they have been churning out.  Heck, I wasn’t even going to watch this new Trek movie, mostly because I really have no frame of reference.  All I knew is that it stars Michelle Yeoh who played the Captain on Discovery.  However, when the abysmal reviews started circling, it piqued my interest.  More than one person exclaimed it was “The worst thing ever to come out bearing the Star Trek name”.  Then, I got REAL interested. 

I always take the IMDb ratings with a grain of salt, but when I saw this had a 3.8, I knew I had to check it out.  For reference, the universally hated (although I like it) Star Trek V has a 5.5.  As a fan of bad movies, that sold me.  It was time to bold go where no Star Trek movie ever went before.  Straight to streaming. 

Emperor Philippa Georgiou (Yeoh) is hanging out on the edge of the galaxy.  Alok, a hardass from Section 31 (Omari Hardwick, looking like the Great Value version of Common) lures her back for one last mission.  Together, they have to steal a top-secret weapon.  Naturally, things go south, the weapon falls into the wrong hands, and it’s up to their team to get it back 

Basically, Section 31 is like the Star Trek version of Guardians of the Galaxy with its ragtag group of misfits pulling off a heist.  Sadly, none of the characters are memorable and most of them feel like slight rewrites of shit we’ve seen in Trek over the decades.  Right from the lazy set-up that feels like a mission debriefing in a video game, you know it’s going to be rough going.  It seems to be going for a hip kind of mood.  Like if you asked AI to imagine that Tarantino Star Trek movie that never got off the ground.  The music during Yeoh’s introduction sounds like a slight reworking of “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”, and the rewinding of past events and/or planned heists is obnoxious.  The useless camera zoom ins and outs during the action bits are annoying too and feel like something out of a bad ‘00s action flick. 

I knew I was in trouble when I saw Olatunde Osunsanmi as the director.  He’s the guy who made the crushingly bad fake UFO abduction movie, The Fourth Kind. If you’ve never seen that flick, consider yourself lucky.  This isn’t quite as bad, but it is easily the worst feature-length Trek flick. 

The performances are a mixed bag.  The only bright spot is Humberly Gonzalez, who plays the sexy, bald Deltan, but unfortunately, she doesn’t stick around for long.  As much as I wanted to like Yeoh in this, her character is frustrating as she seesaws from stereotypical Dragon Lady to miserable looking boss bitch.  As a fan of Yeoh, I have to say this isn’t the best use of her talents. 

Fortunately, after a rather dreadful half-hour, the film finds its footing and becomes, at the very least, watchable.  The best stretch is the second act when the group try to snuff out a mole who is sabotaging their mission.  These scenes are competently put together.  However, you know you’re in trouble when you’re fainting praising basic competency in a Star Trek movie. 

So yeah, the internet didn’t lie.  I don’t think I hated it as much as the fanboys did, but it certainly is the worst Star Trek movie by a fair margin.  Even the weakest of the theatrical films were still pretty good and felt like honest to God iterations of Star Trek.  Section 31 is quite removed from Gene Roddenberry’s original vision.  There’s no sense of wonder, exploration, and adventure.  Instead, it’s just a lot of cheap action, mindless quips, and incoherent plotting.  If you enough reading Firefly fan fiction, you’ll probably eat it up. 

WOLF MAN (2025) * ½

After royally fucking up The Invisible Man, I’m surprised Universal was dumb enough to let writer/director Leigh Whannell tackle another one of their beloved monster properties.  As with The Invisible Man, Whannell shows he would rather do his own riff on the classic monsters without really honoring what came before.  It’s like he feels carte blanche to make up his own shit while remaining confident that people will still see it based on the brand name alone.  However, in doing so, he just reinforces the obvious fact that he doesn’t have a clue as to what made the original monsters so special in the first place. 

Blake Lovell (Christopher Abbott) is a writer who brings his wife (Julia Garner) and kid (Matilda Firth) back to his family home in the backwoods of Oregon.  When he is wounded by a deranged animal man, Blake slowly becomes sick.  Eventually, he turns into a monster and comes after his family. 

I will say Wolf Man is a slight improvement over Whannell’s The Invisible Man redo, although that’s not saying a helluva lot.  Whannell does deliver at least one moderately suspenseful sequence (the car accident scene), but for the most part, he spends too much of the movie twiddling his thumbs when he should be delivering the goods.  I will say I liked the family’s name. 

Ultimately, it all just feels hackneyed and lame.  First of all, the Wolf Man design is terrible.  This might be the first Wolf Man in history who gets LESS hairy as he transforms.  In fact, he kind of looks like the elf from Elves.  I’m not kidding.  Where’s Jack Pierce and Rick Baker when you need them?

It also hurts the film that he transforms so slowly.  Not only does it rob us of a cool transformation scene, it gives Abbott nothing to work with.  He loses his ability to speak halfway through and his grunting and growling does little to help convey his predicament to the audience. 

Speaking of acting, the leads are rather bland and have zero chemistry.  In every scene it feels like they’re actors who just met and are performing a scene together for the first time as there is absolutely no connection between them.  It doesn’t help that the dialogue among the family members often sounds like something out of a group therapy session. 

The ending is the pits too.  Not only is it among the worst conclusions to a werewolf movie ever captured on film, it has to be one of the most anticlimactic endings in a major studio release in some time.  In short, this Wolf Man is nothing to howl about.