The Last Godfather is intended to be a comedy. It stars and is written and directed by Hyung-rae Shim, who, by all accounts, is quite popular in his native South Korea, even if there’s no real evidence of such here.
See, it’s about this … well, you see, there’s this … ah, to hell with it. I’ll let screencaps from the movie say it all.
You get the picture. —Rod Lott
After the super-hot, high-fashion model Celine (Elsa Pataky of Fast Five) disappears one night in Italy, her almost-as-hot sister, Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner, Mrs. Roman Polanski), persuades goateed FBI inspector Enzo Avolfi (Adrien Brody) to help find her. In a voice that apes Columbo, he agrees, but only because he suspects she’s been abducted by a serial killer he’s there to track.
Said slayer is known as Yellow, so dubbed for his jaundiced skin that’s a shade or two away from full-on Oompa-Loompa. He’s a cabbie who dresses in a hoodie and an Axl Rose bandana. He sucks on a pacifier, reads pornographic comics and talks like Gollum. He only kills young, beautiful, young foreigners, making them ugly in various ways, like planting a hammer to a forehead. You know, the
get-shit-done stuff.
Giallo was greeted with critical scorn, but I believe if it had any other director’s name affixed but Dario Argento, response may have been better. Not that it’s great, but it’s more serviceable than your average Hollywood killer thriller. Plus, all of the horror maestro’s signature touches are intact: vivid colors, uncomfortable close-ups, unflinching gore.
Okay, so the ending is anticlimactic, and Yellow a real goofball of a villain, but nothing so awful that Brody need bad-mouth it to the press and attempt to have his name removed from it. Of all the misbegotten projects he could have disowned after winning an Oscar — The Village, The Jacket, King Kong — and this is the one he sticks his nose up at? And that’s one prodigious beak! —Rod Lott
Officially, I Am Omega is not based on the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. Yeah, whatever, but po-tay-to fucking po-tah-to: It’s totally based on the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. After all, we’re talking a production of The Asylum, which specializes in taking popular movies to Kinko’s and then Liquid Paper-ing just enough names to satisfy legal.
This one, of course, only exists to coincide with Will Smith’s end-o’-the-world blockbuster I Am Legend of the same year. But Omega star Mark Dacascos is no Will Smith — and thank God for that, because this last man on Earth gets to do what America’s favorite Man in Black did not: train with fighting sticks and practice martial arts, not to mention beat the steering wheel of his crappy car like a drum kit while listening to generic stock rock on cassette.
I expected Omega to suck completely, because it kills the MILF within less than two minutes from starting. But all is mostly forgiven by the time Dacascos is beating back the undead with nunchucks. Sometimes when he fights zombies, Itchy & Scratchy music squeals away on the soundtrack.
Anyhoo, Dacascos’ character is not the last human alive, of course. A video feed reveals there’s an undernourished but not unattractive out there. She’s being sought by rednecks for the antivirus that lives in her blood. Don’t get too excited, viewers, because her high-pitched, whiny voice mitigates any good looks. Speaking of voices, don’t zombies realize they’d be more successful if they didn’t announce their arrival with a cry of “ROWR!” each and every time? —Rod Lott
George Romero has been associated with some diabolically fun horror anthologies of the past, including Creepshow, Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and Two Evil Eyes. Do not add Deadtime Stories to that list. Neither writing nor directing, Romero just collects a paycheck as host. Sitting in a chair with his signature TV-tube-shaped, black-rimmed glasses nearly as big as his head, he introduces three incredibly amateurish tales with zero star power (this not being 1985, Nick Mancuso does not count), not to mention any power, period. Hell, they can’t even be bothered to keep the typeface consistent.
In the first, “Valley of the Shadow,” a woman assembles a South American jungle expedition to search for her husband, who’s been missing for three years. Once there, one team member finds trees bearing strange fruit that look like extra-veiny testicles and squirt Aim toothpaste; but pay no mind, as this discovery has nothing to do with the story. They arrive at one island where not one of them thinks to say, “Hey, what’s with all those bloody heads on the pointy sticks?” Moral of the story: White people are stupid assholes.
“Wet” is just that. Despite warnings not to, a fat, bearded ginger pulls a mermaid head out of a box and buries it with her other parts. She comes back to life, crawls into his bed, and bites off his wiener. Then he turns into a merman. It’s like Splash meets … oh, say, a Turkish prison toilet. Moral of the story: Mancuso is starting to look an awful lot like Howard Hesseman.
Tom Savini directs the final chapter, the old-timey-set “House Call,” in which a frenzied woman summons a wizened old doctor to her home because her son thinks he’s a vampire — shades of Romero’s Martin — and he is. Moral of the story: I shan’t waste my precious time on Volume 2. —Rod Lott
