All posts by Louis Fowler

White Chamber (2018)

If you thought America has the market on dystopic futures mostly cornered, here’s White Chamber, a surprisingly non-YA tale of Great Britain under civil war (I think mostly because of Nigel Farage).

Waking up inside a white room (with, sadly, no black curtains), Dr. Elle Chrystler (Shauna Macdonald, The Descent) is slowly tortured by the mysterious room, which generously has the ability to heat up, freeze down and, gunkiest of all, drop acid for a sprinkler system. The man holding her hostage is apparently rebel leader Zakarian (Oded Fehr, 1999’s The Mummy), who we thought in the first few minutes of the film was a reputable leader of the people.

Then, surprise, the film backtracks five days and we learn that, originally, it was Zakarian who was the prisoner, with a whole team of scientists controlling the white chamber. They aren’t torturing him for fun and games — instead, they’re testing a wide variety of drugs to see what works and what doesn’t in order to create the latest and greatest of super-soldiers to make Britain safe for those who supported Brexit. Science!

As much as I like the idea of White Chamber, for the most part, it’s a little too repetitive given its two-room budget. We’re either in the chamber or the lab, making the film very rinse, torture and repeat for its own good. Additionally, it has a believability-pushing ending that almost made me feel like this might turn into a notorious comedy of manners, right down to the mistaken identities. Gorblimey, luv! —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

The Haunted Castle (1921)

German director F.W. Murnau made many popular films in his heyday, including the silent-era vampire flick Nosferatu, which still shocks today, almost as much as it did in 1922. With many of his films finally being remastered and released, however, there’s bound to be a few low points, one of which is the mostly tiresome silent film The Haunted Castle.

Going into this, even though, yes, there are a few sequences that prophesize what was to come in many of his later films, know that really nothing in particular is haunted, and the “hunting party” is in much more of a chateau as opposed to a castle. The plot of the movie revolves around the sudden arrival of the notorious Count Oetsch at the castle, a creepy fellow that everyone believes murdered his brother … or did he?

Thankfully, a mystery-solving monk shows up to help solve the crime, but not before a few dream sequences are had, including one where a tiny chef eats cream and smacks his boss in the face — which, when I write it out, is probably sexual.

Either way, like I said, it’s an interesting watch if you’re more a student of film who has the patience, but I’m pretty sure most other people will just switch the channel over to Murder, She Wrote for a far more engaging whodunit and a probable guest appearance by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

The Blu-ray from Kino Classics also has the Murnau flick The Finances of the Grand Duke, which I haven’t seen, but imagine it’s got dour men in white cake makeup making exaggerated faces, probably while looking at bills and notices, when a title card comes on the screen that reads “Sweet mother’s pearls, Reinhold … the Grand Duke’s finances are not very good … I have an idea, let’s have a picnic!”

End of Act One. —Louis Fowler

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Teen Movie Hell: A Crucible of Coming-of-Age Comedies from Animal House to Zapped!

Teen Movie Hell, if released 20 or so years ago, would desperately sit on my shelf next to the various Psychotronics and Gore Scores, yellowing with useful age, pages dog-eared beyond belief. Sadly, it’s not 20 or so years ago, so this read — and what a great read it is — and its collection of movie reviews is mostly superfluous in the age of the internet.

Good thing that I — and mostly middle-aged shut-ins like me — still have those Psychotronics and Gore Scores in their bookcases, a little less used but still ultimately revered, and am still able to find a spot on the shelf for Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s latest tome, even if its re-readability is strained in this modern day and age.

Still, McPadden does a good job of capturing those youthful urges and rejected dirges to see little darlings, party animals and bikini carwashes in their natural environment of toplessness, surrounded with plenty of suds — of both the beer and bathing variety — as a fat guy belly-flops into a pool while a dog with sunglasses covers his head in disbelief.

Dissecting the lesser-known trash — Computer Beach Party and Hamburger: The Motion Picture, for example — alongside the well-known flicks the cool kids favored — The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink ring a bell? — as well as a couple of questionable-but-welcome entries (including Police Academy, this former teen’s favorite) — Teen Movie Hell is definitely is a must-have for anyone with a nostalgic bent that begins in their pants and doesn’t go much further.

Enjoy your home on my shelf next to this stack of Re/Search books. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Robot Ninja (1989)

A stealth killing machine trained in the ancient art of invisible assassination known as ninjutsu — who also happens to walk with the clankity-clank of a clunky robot, mind you — is becoming the biggest hit on Burt Ward’s television station.

Pushing aside the fact that Burt Ward has a successful television station, the campy humor of the Robot Ninja program doesn’t sit well with the creator, Leonard Miller (Michael Todd, Lurking Fear). Instead of filing an injunction or, even easier, moving on and creating an anti-Robot Ninja answer in comic-book form, Miller hooks up with his German friend and creates a real-life Robot Ninja suit.

When he runs afoul of the city’s top criminals — apparently a couple of rednecks in your uncle’s windowless van — Miller pops a handful of pain pills and slams some pieces of metal in his forearm and takes the Robot Ninja-ing to the streets, wreaking low-budget havoc in many open fields and parking lots, with plenty of old-school gore effects that made Tempe Entertainment releases Friday night must-rents.

Directed with empty-pocketed flair by legendary backyard filmmaker J.R. Bookwalter (The Dead Next Door), this last-ditch effort to get the video label’s efforts out to this new generation of film geeks is a grand one, complete with an autographed Blu-ray sleeve and a moderately entertaining comic-book tie-in. But for me, Robot Ninja mostly karate-chops my own sense of teenage nostalgia, so much so that I’d like to preorder Bookwalter’s Ozone and The Sandman, if possible. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Mega Time Squad (2018)

My recent throat surgeon was from New Zealand, and even though he was completely no-nonsense, I kept waiting for him to crack a simplistic joke, mostly because the night before my pre-op, I watched the guffaw-getting Mega Time Squad, the new temporal-twisting flick from Tim van Dammen, the director of the trailer-park musical Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song.

Low-level neighborhood criminal John (Anton Tennet) wreaks polite havoc in the small town of Thames, New Zealand, famous for its tourist-trap outdoor toilet. When he’s politely betrayed by his best friend over a few dollars worth of stolen Chinese money, he uses an ancient Asian amulet, politely stolen in the same robbery, to go back in time, a few minutes at a time.

Much like the far more serious Timecrimes, various incarnations of John run into each other, eventually teaming up to become the titular Mega Time Squad, despite that fact it could resurrect an infernal demon hellbent on destroying the time-space continuum unless all the replicas themselves are killed in outlandishly gory ways.

With help from his polite, suicide bomb vest-making girlfriend, Kelly (Hetty Gaskell-Hahn), John has to not only defeat the area crime team made up of locals working their way through night school, but also the so-called Triads and an army of increasingly irritated Johns, as piss-poor shots from .22s injures eyes, well-aimed slingshots cause major welts and explosions galore, all done in very dry, very clever and very polite ways, all with absolutely no meaning.

Come to think of it, my throat surgeon — a qualified man of medicine — was also very polite. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.