Blubberella (2011)

I'd been wanting to do more Uwe Boll and Michael Paré, saw this was on Watch Instantly, and figured I'd give it a go. Did I have high hopes? I don't know. Uwe is all kinds of hit and miss. One moment you get BloodRayne: The Third Reich, which didn't work at all for me; the next you get In the Name of the King 2: Two Worlds, which came in behind Mega Python vs. Gatoroid for my best DTV flick of 2011. If Blubberella is anything in between, I'll be happy.

Blubberella is a spoof of BloodRayne: Third Reich starring Lindsay Hollister as our eponymous heroine. She's a half human half vampire living in 1940s Germany, looking for potential suitors on a Jewish dating site. Problem is, all her dates are standing her up. When she discovers it's the Nazis that are the cause of this, she vows to kill them all, and this brings her into contact with the resistance, led by Brendan Fletcher, with whom she's immediately smitten. Unfortunately, in her blood lust for Nazis, she's accidentally turned Paré, and now he and Clint Howard want her blood so they can make an army of vampires to conquer the world.



I don't know what to do with this one. It's not only a spoof of BloodRayne: The Third Reich, but it's shot in all the locations, with the entire cast except for Natassia Malthe. It's kind of like in the style of Scary Movie, only mixed with Uwe Boll. Very few of the jokes were funny, but it was almost because they were so unfunny that they were intriguing, if that makes sense. And a lot of it was just weird, like when Blubberella has a dream where she's playing Risk with Adolf Hitler (played by Boll) and (I think) Brendan Fletcher in black face. I don't know, what do you do with that? I guess I got my wish, this was somewhere in between BloodRayne: The Third Reich and In the Name of the King 2, but that's not much of a help.

Getting back to that dream sequence... I don't know.... The black face would be appalling, if this weren't a dream sequence, but in that sense it almost adds to the surrealism. I also think Boll was making fun of Robert Downey Jr.'s character in Tropic Thunder. Speaking of Boll, seeing him as Hitler is a trip. It's more than just them playing Risk. He has a meal and checks out her Jewish dating site profile with her too. There's something very Uwe Boll about the whole thing, and, I don't know, like I said above, what do I do with that?



For some reason, there's a scene here that parodies Precious. This scene also features some black face. Of all the movies to make fun of, Precious isn't at the top of my list. I don't know, there isn't a lot in a girl living with a violently abusive mother and has a father who made her pregnant twice and infected her with AIDS that warrants humor. I don't even know if this scene was Boll's idea, because there were more writers in on this than just him. It was just very weird.

Blubberella was played by Lindsay Hollister, and I think she did pretty well. It was a lot of self-deprecating humor-- including one random scene where she's in a meat locker dropping off sausages and stuff-- but when it went away from "hey, guess what, I'm fat, isn't that funny?", and did some more fun stuff, she was definitely up to the task. I think this movie, especially with some of he odder scenes, like the Uwe Boll as Hitler ones, could've worked better without all the fat jokes, and just rested on the fact that Hollister as a big woman was playing a superhero.



Finally, I want to give a big shout out and congratulations to our buddy Mitch over at The Video Vacuum for making it into this film. You can see him there in the blue Mexican wrestler mask. What's most amazing is how humble he's been about it. Anyone else with a movie blog-- yours truly included-- would've been trumpeting an appearance in an Uwe Boll flick all over the place, but Mitch, he kept it under the radar. Well Mitch, because you were too classy to do it yourself, I'll do it for you, and let the world know about your cool cameo in Blubberella.

And on that good note, let's wrap this up. You may find this offensive. You may find it hilarious. You may find it exceedingly unfunny. Or you might be like me an have no idea what to do with it. First thing I'd say is, if you have any plans to see this, watch BloodRayne: Third Reich first, just so you get some of what they were going for. Otherwise, tread at your own risk.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1756427/

Bloodrayne: The Third Reich (2010)

We're back in the Uwe Boll ring, this time with another Bloodrayne movie. I wasn't a big fan of the last one-- not really the one before that either-- but with Michael Paré and Clint Howard, I couldn't in good conscience stay off this one. Unfortunately, I realized too late that the DVD version I got from Netflix is the R-rated one, which at 79 minutes long is 16 minutes shorter than the unrated version. Keep that in mind if you've seen the latter as you read this review.

Bloodrayne: The Third Reich takes place, you guessed it, in the heart of Nazi Germany. Our heroine doesn't like Nazis, but in the process of taking out a bunch of them, bites Michael Paré, a commandant, and that turns him. That's bad news, because Pare is a kickass vampire, and after thirty minutes of nothing really happening, he decides, with Dr. Mangler's (Clint Howard) help, to create an army of Nazi vampires. Can Rayne stop them?



Wow, this could've been amazing. I don't know what happened, but the whole thing got all bogged down in a story that was useless, a bunch of monotony that was only broken up by a solid lesbian scene. Not only that, but I felt like Clint Howard was wasted. He had one good mad scientist scene, and from there he was just reciting bad dialog written by someone who speaks English as a second language, which is funny, but not funny enough. Then there was the leader of the rebellion, who was a tool, but Bloodrayne's love interest or something. Boll has this thing for casting tools as lead guys in these Bloodrayne movies. On the other hand, the beginning (after a 6 minute credit sequence) was good, and the last 20 minutes were pretty solid. If this hit a more boom, boom, action; boom, boom, action pace, as opposed to action, nothing, blah, lesbian scene, nothing, blah, action, it would've been much better.

Michael Paré is becoming something of a Uwe Boll mainstay. Here he plays the main villain, and he's pretty good at it. The problem is, he's given a bunch of bad scenes where he's trying to come to terms with being a vampire or something. They needed to cut that shit out and go right into him creating a Nazi Vampire Army with Clint Howard, providing tons of fodder for sweet fight scenes with Bloodrayne. Unfortunately, none of that happened. Still, he was a solid baddie. Paré has a pretty robust late 80s/early 90s DTV catalog that we've only just scratched the surface of (much to the chagrin of our friend Kenner at Movies in the Attic). Hopefully we'll start making more of that happen in the near future.



Nastassia Malthe reprises her role as the eponymous heroine. The thing that always betrays her is the toolbags she's cast opposite of, this time the leader of the rebellion. I can understand her wanting to get a cheap lay in with the guy while she's in a prison van heading to meet Hitler, but to take the guy seriously? That's too much. Also, for a hot action chick, she doesn't get a lot of action in. Uwe Boll needs to fix that if he plans on making a fourth one of these with a Croatian tax credit. Still, love the red streaks, black nail polish, and black leather vintage American football helmet-- hot look.

I'm a big Clint Howard guy, and when I saw him on the cast list and based on the first scene he was in, I was expecting an evil scientist worthy of a 40s/50s sci-fi/horror flick. Again, not what I got, I got a lot of bad dialog that was supposed to sound like intelligent, sophisticated dialog. Come on now. Didn't you see Ice Cream Man? Get after it Uwe Boll, and have fun with it. We don't want a serious plot driven film about vampires in Nazi Germany, especially one with a substandard plot; we want some crazy-assed shit, especially when we see Clint Howard on the cast list.



Uwe Boll seems like he should be perfect for what we do here at the DTVC, just like The Asylum or Albert Pyun; but I seem to dislike more of his movies than I enjoy them. I don't know what it is. Part of it is the bad story arcs that dominate what should be fun bad action and horror; and part of it is the casting decisions he makes. Here it was the leader of the rebellion. Then there's an annoying doughy guy he used in Bloodrayne II and Far Cry. It's like he's a good idea at the time, but in the execution he doesn't work.

And therein lies the rub. While this had pieces that worked, it had more that didn't, and ultimately made it something I couldn't recommend. That's too bad, because I wanted to like this, and I should've liked this. Uwe Boll just couldn't get out of his own way.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1153546/

Fist of the North Star (1995)

I saw this a long time ago, not long after it came out in the mid-90s. I didn't know it was based on Anime, or what I called at the time Japanimation. It may have given me a better understanding of its silliness, but I don't know. What I do know is I needed to revisit it considering this is the summer of Gary Daniels and Olivier Gruner.

Fist of the North Star is a post-apocalyptic film about a dictator, played by Costas Mandylor, who's trying to rebuild society through the use of an iron fist. He's also an accomplished martial artist, and he killed the leader of his rival school, Malcolm McDowell. Now it's up to his son, Gary Daniels, to take him down, and he has the added incentive of saving his woman, who Mandylor took from Daniels to be his wife.



I've been holding off on this one because I just don't know exactly how to play it. On the one hand, it's not my kind of movie, because a lot of people have gross faces, and I'm not always a fan of that ridiculous style of martial arts where people's heads explode and whatnot. On the other, the martial arts isn't bad, and it has a very high silliness quotient. It was like it didn't do it for me, but it did, if that makes any sense. It's not like Hard Justice, where I was like, BAM!!, that's what I'm talking about. But it's not like some of the movies I hated, where I wanted to burn the disc. It's like Pizza Hut, where it's good, but is it better than that local pizza joint that just kills it, or the downtown gourmet place? No; but it's better than that scary stuff you sometimes see in a Chinese food buffet.

Daniels really gets to flex his martial arts muscles here, which is good. This was no Bloodmoon, but what is, really? I'm not sure how much I dig the dark colored mullet though. I guess the thing is he's kind of out of his element. I just see him as a cop with sick martial arts skills smoking myriad fools while making the ultimate drug bust. Stoic martial arts master with a grudge and a dark colored mullet just doesn't quite fit. According to imdb, he's playing Bryan Fury in the new Tekken movie. Though that sounds hot, I'd rather see him as Armor King, and, looking through the credits, they don't even have a King and/or Armor King. It must be because they were so dominant in Tekken Tag Team, the film makers felt like they'd have no film with them in it.



I was going through all the tags I have, trying to pare down some of the ones that seemed a tad on the superfluous side. I found I had one for Costas Mandylor, even though he has only one film reviewed, Gangland with Sasha Mitchell. I think, at the time, I intended to review more of his catalog, and it just never happened. Now here we are, with film number 2. Again, like Daniels, I like him better as a modern cop with martial arts skills over a post-apocalyptic despot. What makes him worse as a despot is his character actually grows out his mullet. He talks about recreating civilization, and then he spawns this ape drape out of his head. The future will be business in the front and party in the back. Mandylor is busy now making Saw movies, and I believe, according to imdb, Saw 57 is in post production.

Club MTV's Downtown Julie Brown is in this as an engineer or something in a small village outside of Mandylor's city. I used to watch that show, along with everything else on MTV back then. Later it would become The Grind with Eric Nies from the first season of The Real World. Do they still have dance shows today? I never really got them. Usually my friends and I just picked out the silliest people and made fun of them for however long. The best was Ian from The Grind, who was their Alternative guy. He wore shaggy hair and US Postal Service jackets, and his raison d'etre was the one quasi Alternative dance track they'd play each show, usually "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys.



I was trying to decide whether to devote this last paragraph to Malcolm McDowell, Chris Penn, or Clint Howard, all of whom are in this film. I went another route. Did you know John Cho, the guy from Harold and Kumar that wasn't Kumar, is 37 years old? Young Sulu ain't so young Sulu, if you know what I mean. Man, I hope I look that young when I'm 37. Seriously, 37.

Man, I don't know where to go with this. I don't think I've ever been so on the fence in the final analysis of a film ever. What I can say is, no matter what, this is silly as all hell. Good martial arts, some grossness, but not in a cool, Cyborg kind of way, and surprisingly nice set designs. It's just a matter of whether you embrace the silliness, or disdain it. And I'll take it a step further, if you embrace the silliness, you may want to go all the way and watch Riki-Oh.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113074/

Ice Cream Man (1995)

This is a movie that I've been trying to get up for a long time. The problem is I've never actually seen the whole thing. It's always on Sci-Fi late at night, and I always fall asleep. Or someone has it, but we only see so much of it before we do something else. I finally decided to hunker down and make it happen, so here it is.

Ice Cream Man has veteran character actor Clint Howard leading a start studded cast, where he plays a psychotic ice cream man. The kids in town have a bad feeling about him, and when one of them sees him stuff their friend in the back of the van, they know there's trouble. Slowly the town believes them, but by then the death toll's grown pretty high. Ultimately it's up to the kids to take him down.



This is pretty hilarious. It's meant to be a campy horror film, and it is. Clint Howard is perfectly cast, as you can well imagine. There's some pretty funny ice cream deaths, but not as many as you'd imagine. If I have one complaint, it's that it wasn't creative enough. You had a guy who's decapitated and has his head planted on an ice cream cone. In another, Howard throws a kid into his Kenmore freezer, and tells him "You're ice cream!" I have no idea what that even means, which I think makes it funnier. Maybe the best was the use of an eyeball for the marshmallow in a scoop of Rocky Road. Still, more people were just stabbed, which is pretty boring.

Really what makes this good, is that it's not as funny as the people who made it think it is. It's essentially another Catalina Caper. In the MST3K episode guide, they said Catalina Caper was one of the more challenging films they did, because they were making fun of a comedy. I think if you're a veteran bad movie guy, this is the kind of film you need to go for, just to see how much you really got. Can you pick apart a film that's intentionally supposed to be funny? On another note, I never thought I'd see this, but Mike Nelson's RiffTrax has taken on my all time favorite movie, Casablanca. I'm very curious.



Clint Howard has a huge resume. In 1998 he won the lifetime achievement award at the MTV Movie Awards. Part of me thinks "how is this his first film on the site?"; but when I look at what he's done, a lot of it is mainstream stuff. He was in Frost/Nixon. I mean, it helps having Ron Howard for a brother. You think Ted Raimi could get into the Spiderman films if his brother wasn't Sam? But also, what that does is it limits his availability for this kind of bigger role in a DTV film.

There are a whole bunch of other people in this too. If I forget one, I'm sorry. You got the chick from Conan that was the baddie in Red Sonja (do you ever annoy your friends and call it Son-jah? I love doing that.). There's a chick from One Life to Live. Jan Michael Vincent and Lee Majors II play detectives. Olivia Hussey, who you may remember showed her amazing boobs in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Then there's the guy from An American Werewolf in London. Doug Llewelyn, court reporter from The People's Court, the old one with Judge Wapner, is in this as a grocery store manager. Finally, LA Dodgers great Steve Garvey plays one of the kids' fathers. Gotta love Steve Garvey.



I must confess, I'm not much of an ice cream guy. I like it. My favorite flavor is Cherry Garcia. But I don't go crazy for it. Too much of it makes my stomach hurt immensely. Also, my neighborhood never had an ice cream man growing up. I guess we were too far out of the way, even though we had tons of kids around, and we were right near the highway. It's funny, because growing up my hometown, Kittery, Maine, was considered the boonies. We're like 50 miles north of Boston, right on the southern tip of the state on the New Hampshire border. When I went to college at UMaine, 15 minutes north of Bangor, and three hours north of Kittery, I learned that being within three miles as the crow flies from the nearest shopping mall was not the boonies.

This is definitely worth checking out. It's not as funny as it thinks it is, but it's funny enough. It's very gross, so if you have friends that're a little squeamish, you may want them to pass, or at least not have them eat Firecracker Sausages while you watch it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113376/