"Effective Management Film Studies"

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Black Spring Break 2 The Sequel
starring Daron "Southboy" Fordham, Keisha Lewis, directed by Daniel Zirilli , Color, Unrated, 2001
Distributed by Vision Films
Video Reviewed By: Chris Beyond

Perhaps there were two signs that the world was about to end on September 11th, 2001. First was that tragedy we've all come to know as simply "September 11th" or even the shorter catchier nickname "9-11", but another disaster was dropped on the world that day... Yes, that was the unfortunate release date of the straight to video epic known as "Black Spring Break 2 The Sequel". Sure you may come up with fancy arguements as to why one event was somewhat more tragic than the other with all the lives lost and all or say things like "dear god, are you really equating the loss of thousands of lives, the fear it caused in the world, the loss of personal freedoms, the escuse for the uprising of religion in politics, the eventual forced wrong turn known as Iraq...with the release of a crappy straight to video sequel to a film barely anyone has heard of?" To that I say Yes Yes Yes... What a minute... NO! That would be a horrible thing to say. What was I thinking? I apologize to anyone out there I may have offended. Seriously.

But while fundimental religious terrorists were starting their own war with the U.S., Black Spring Break 2 The Sequel was waging its OWN kind of Terrorism on the people of America and not at all connected to the Terror attacks of September 11th. The kind or terror it was waging was not in the form of bombs or tax breaks for the wealthy. No, this was deep psychological terror sent through our audio/visual senses straight to the hearts and minds of anyone who was the unwitting victim of Black Spring Break 2 The Sequel. It's damage has been wider than anyone could have imagined having penetrated video, dvd, cable, an sattelite markets across the country.

Black Spring Break 2 The Sequel follows the adventures of football star "Southboy" and his goofy friend Greg who return to college and want to pledge (for some reason) at some hyper-militant fraternaty whose members tell them that they must go to Daytona Beach to have themselves "a Spring Break...a BLACK Spring Break". Now being a Tim Burton and David Lynch fan, I figured, ok, this is going to venture into some dark twisted tale of senseless intrigue. But, no, I guess what the film is trying to tell us is that the African-American Spring Break experience is much different than that of your average Caucasion or Asian Spring Break experience. To be honest, I have no idea either way. I spent my Spring Breaks trying to find, or hanging out with girlfriends. In any case, that's about as deep as it gets with the race issue. So I guess the "plot" of the film involves Southboy having to prove his manhood or his friend's manhood to the fraternity by midnight or something. I don't know since most of the dialogue is hidden under layers and layers of background noise

So a bunch of stuff happens, the guys get robbed by some lady who seduced them, Southboy falls for some gal who hates fancy football players so Southboy has to pretend he's a normal guy or something or other. The dialogue is usually lost due to what I'm guessing was a microphone which was covered in old chewing gum and then kept in a bowl of water while shooting. Oh and there are some ladies who are out to get into Southboy's pants or whatever.

So, yeah, this film is not good. I kind of knew that as I tivoed it, but I gave it a chance. In writing this review I was able to find a fuzzy picture of the director. He also directed Voodoo Mardi Gras. Whatta guy! Anyway, I do worry sometimes that films like this do more to harm race relations than help them, but in the end the film itself is just harmless fun and shouldn't be taken seriously. Harmless, but a bad bad bad bad film (I don't even know how they got Snoop on the soundtrack). Still I'd rather watch this than a political ad where George Bush uses 9-11 to try to get re-elected anyday.

Well, folks … here it goes.

I was extremely cynical and, at times, horrified by the thought of a Dawn of the Dead remake. Last year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake left such a bad taste in my mouth, that I was ready to go to the theater the night Dawn opened and pay people NOT to go see this film. I saw stills from it in magazines, I read interviews with cast and crew, I watched the trailer repeatedly on the internet … and the verdict was always the same: THIS FLICK IS GONNA SUCK. Worse than that, even. I thought this movie was going to be the ruination of modern horror film making as a whole. I figured it was gonna be nothing more than a bunch of short-attention-span machine-gun edits set to a Nickelback soundtrack … raping the dignity and memory of Romero’s classic, iconic horror masterpiece.

Anyway, I couldn’t take it. I swore I would only watch this if somebody brought me a bootleg. No way were these cinematic rapist, necrophiliacs going to get MY money! But Friday night came and it just wouldn’t get out of my head. Then I read a couple reviews. They weren’t so bad. Dammit, I thought, are people actually going to LIKE this tripe? I know a lot of people dug that Chainsaw remake, too … was this gonna be another bamboozling of the horror-going public by the major studios? Then I thought, Well, I DID like Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead remake (which means I’m, like, one of ten other people in the world.) So fuggit, fine, I’ll go. Whatever. I’ll bring some booze, turn off my brain, and set back and let my vitriol fly! I’ll be a martyr! I can take it! Bring on the bullshit!

It’s important I let you know what my mindset was going into this. I was truly distraught over it. After all, this past year they’ve announced plans to remake pretty much EVERY good 70’s horror film (Suspiria, The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left, Assault on Precinct 13). Hell, now they’re even tapping into the 80’s with a Pet Sematary redux just around the corner. (And, lest we forget the impending remake of Mute Witness, a movie that was released in 19friggin94!)
Ok … so … take a breath. I saw the movie opening night. Heart aflutter, ready for the visual equivalent of having my balls caught in an old top-loading VCR … Ready to look every jackass in the eye and tell ‘em, I TOLD YOU SO!

But something happened. I ended up seeing one of the best horror films, and certainly one of the best ZOMBIE films, of the pat ten years. To my surprise, this flick smacked me solid in the face and made me EAT pretty much every single word I typed in the first two big paragraphs of this review. Damn, was it great! There’s a few things I could nitpick there and there, but who cares? This was just great, great stuff, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve stepped back from the ledge; I’m a believer now.

You know the story: Something is causing the dead to walk and they begin to decimate the population of planet Earth. A gaggle of survivors barricade themselves in a nearby shopping mall and learn to adapt to a new way of life. Not much has changed, premise-wise, from Romero’s original. But they make enough changes and update it enough for it to qualify as its own movie. Or, if not its OWN movie, then at least an extension of the original. My theory is, Hey, there were probably more than just one group of people during the Zombie Holocaust who found refuge in a shopping mall; this is just THEIR story. It’s possible. Deal with it. Move on.

Nothing here blemishes the original. The filmmakers get pretty much everything right. The first ten minutes ALONE are worth the price of admission. It had me hooked. From there it just gets more and more intense. There was a point where I couldn’t even breathe I was so into it. The zombies are fast and furious (as opposed to Romero’s more somnambulistic ghouls), which normally I don’t like, but they did ‘em right this time. Even the use of pop songs in the soundtrack didn’t bother me (I mean, can any movie that uses Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” for its opening titles go wrong?)

James Gunn’s script is fun, fast, but never false. He more than makes up for that Scooby-Doo crap. And Zack Snyder’s direction is taut and well-intentioned. There are a few missteps, like I said, but for the most part, it maintains the right tone throughout and generally delivers in all the places it should. People might have some issues with the ending, which plays throughout the end credits. I wasn’t that happy with it at first, but it’s grown on me. It’s SOMEWHAT reminiscent of the original Night of the Living Dead in tone.

The thing about it is, the filmmakers never treat it like it’s beneath them. The subject matter is taken seriously, it isn’t video-game or MTV-ized. The flick has integrity, folks, that’s it. They didn’t try to one up, or disdain the source material, and they never pandered to the lowest common denominator. They just told the story they wanted to tell, and they told it well. They occasionally winked at the fans, but they never gave ‘em the finger. If you know what I mean.

While it’s not as good as the original, it’s really damn good in its own right, and that’s all you need. I whole-heartedly recommend this one. It knocked me out, man. Bravo to all involved. You proved me wrong. You put a wicked smile on my face. You did it, that’s all I can say.

You did it.

(Ryan Lies is a staffwriter for No-Fi "Magazine" and knows dead from live flesh.)

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Hangar 18
starring Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn, directed by James Conway , Color, , 1980
Distributed by Legasy
Video Reviewed By: Ryan Lies

I was sick the other night and wanted nothing more than to lay stuffed between my blankets on my bed, sipping orange juice and watch something utterly cheesy and frivolous. I threw in an old, decrepit video called Hangar 18 and got JUST what I wanted. Not only that, I managed to solve a childhood mystery as well!

Sometime way back in 1982 or ’83 (those bygone years are so nebulous now) I stayed up late with my father one night to watch an “alien movie” on network TV (I never had cable growing up, so I have a lot of late-night network TV memories). My dad said it looked like it might be alright, and me being the sucker for anything that had ANYTHING to do with space or aliens or other planets figured sure, why not? I don’t actually recall what I thought of it at the time. I pretty much liked anything back then, just cuz it was a movie. My tastes haven’t exactly grown any more discerning over the years, but back in my formative years, I was even LESS discerning. Weren’t we all? (It’s the only explanation I have for why some of us grew up loving crap like Yor – Hunter of the Future, Metalstorm and TV shows like Manimal.)

Anyway, for years I remembered the movie but I never remembered what it was called. And as the years went by, the only images from the movie I could actually remember with any clarity were a couple of dudes driving a beat-up red truck, and a scene where a guy punches a guy and says “Ouch, I haven’t hit anyone since high school.” That’s all I had to go on. I wandered the aisles of video stores for years wondering what the hell that movie had been, or if I had actually seen it at all.

Well, as you’ve probably guessed, Hangar 18 was that movie. It was also known as Invasion Force, which may be the title I saw it under, cuz even now Hangar 18 doesn’t ring a bell. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what it was called, cuz this is the flick I saw all those years ago. The two elements I mentioned above are in the movie, just like I remembered ‘em.

Hangar 18 is pretty standard fare, cheesy to the extreme, but actually fairly entertaining, if you’re in the mood for it. Light, predictable … Gary Collins and James Hampton (the dad in Teen Wolf) play astronauts who watch a UFO crash into a satellite. When they get down to Earth, they find themselves embroiled in a government cover-up (it’s an election year, and they don’t want some pesky UFO nonsense ruining the president’s shot at re-election. Timely, eh?)

Not much in the way of high-octane thrills and chills. Just a couple of dopey guys running around, trying to prove they aren’t crazy. Lots of interesting things happen and then are dropped from the story altogether (like, what’s up with that girl they found comatose inside the UFO? Or those “landing sights?”) And it has one whopper of a stupid ending.

But I was sick, and I was so happy to have finally solved that childhood conundrum that I just went with it and didn’t care. Maybe I was just so glad the Pepto was finally working that I would’ve loved ANYTHING right then.

Side note: Hangar 18 is also the name of a pretty cool MEGADETH song. The video for it is really wicked. Check it out. Much more entertaining than this movie.

Here it is folks! What may be THE WORST MOVIE OF THE LAST DECADE. It is undoubtedly the WORST ZOMBIE MOVIE EVER MADE. And it is CERTAINLY the WORST MOVIE OF 2003! After seeing Dreamcatcher in early ’03, I didn't think ANYTHING could be worse. Then I saw that insipid, headache-inducing puke called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake in 2003 and I thought there was no way to go further down. Then I saw House of the Dead.

Now, as you all know, I spend a great deal of my life watching and enjoying bad movies. And I'm also a verified, card-carrying zombie nut. Which goes without saying that I've had to trudge through some pretty awful zombie movies (come on, Zombie Lake or Revenge of the Zombie anyone?)


Someone once remarked (and I'm paraphrasing here) that if you put 500 monkeys in a room with pen and paper for 500 days, or whatever, they would end up writing Hamlet? Well, you could stick TWO monkeys in a dark closet for an HOUR with nothing but pretzels and beer and they would come up with something better than House of the Dead. Hell, they could be DEAD monkeys … it wouldn't matter!

There are some gratuitous nude scenes, which is great, but other than that, this movie redefines the term “piece of shit.” We can start with the script, which was penned in part by Mark Altman, who wrote at great length back in the summer of ’99 about how awful George Lucas's script for The Phantom Menace was. Well, let me tell you something Mark … I'll admit Lucas's strongpoint is NOT as a writer, but compared to you, He's a Nobel Laureate! I hesitate to even call anything in this movie “dialogue.” It's a bunch of words thrown together in the hopes creating coherency or wit. Strike out on both!

Want a sample? At one point, the characters come across a swamp and they start sniffing and one of them says “Man, it smells like someone farted.” Come on. This is the best you can come up with? Every line in the movie is something you've heard a thousand times before in horror movies: “It's quiet.” “Yeah, too quiet.” Or “I've got a bad feeling about this.”

But the PRIME example is this: the characters finally come across the “bad guy” who's responsible for all the zombies and they realize He's been doing all these weird experiments to attain immortality. So they say to the “bad guy,” “You created it all so you could be immortal … why?” To which the “bad guy” replies “To live forever …”

WHAT? You wanted to be immortal so you could live forever?!? Are they kidding us? That's word for word, folks. I even watched the subtitles and THAT'S what he says.

The zombie make-up is horrible, the action-sequences are confusing and haphazard. At one point I saw a zombie being launched from a springboard mounted on the ground. It was so glaringly obvious it made me wonder if the editor was blind.

There's a lot, and I do mean A LOT of Matrix-style bullet-time FX and once about every three minutes they edit in some footage from the House of the Dead video game. Sometimes we don't even see the real zombies getting shot, we see the video game zombies being shot. And SOMETIMES they show us scenes from the game FOR NO REASON AT ALL. Like, there's one part where the characters are all walking in the woods and QUICK! They flash to some scenes of zombies getting mowed down on the video game screen and then they cut right back to the woods. Nothing happening … just a little reminder that what you're seeing is a movie based on a video game.

This is positively the worst example of short-attention-span filmmaking. Everything about it just sucks. And worse, it's insulting. How dare these “filmmakers” assume we are all that stupid. This is the movie equivalent of watching someone play a Gameboy while driving REALLY fast through Time Square while someone scans the radio dial over and over again, never settling on a station. This is what the makers of House of the Dead think of their audience.

This isn't even a movie, people. This is nothing more than a sloppy, loud kick to the groin of the mind. We should ban these primates from ever making another movie ever again!

In the commentary track, Mark Altman says they wanted to make the Saving Private Ryan of zombie movies. Spielberg should have him shot.

I’ll just say it now: THIS IS THE BEST DVD RELEASE OF 2003.

Which isn’t to say it’s necessarily the BE-ALL END-ALL DVD I would’ve liked, but hey, it’s the Jones movies, so whatever. It rocks my world.

Truth be told, this box set is pretty tight. As per usual, there are no Spielberg commentaries, but on the fourth supplemental disc, there are four featurettes covering the special FX, the stunts, the music and the sound design of all three films. And then there are three fun, informative, fairly exhaustive Making-Of documentaries, one for each film.

Raiders gets the most attention here, with the longest Making-Of and the most prominent coverage in the featurettes. This is to be expected. Raiders is probably the most revered and favorite among movie goers and critics. The sequels get their due, but on a diminishing scale.

This is where my only complaints about the box set come in: I would’ve liked the same amount of attention thrown at all films equally, as I feel they are all genius, kick ass fantasy action flicks, and while each has its strengths and weaknesses, they are all classics in my mind, and thus deserving of the same attention to detail that is given Raiders.

Temple of Doom has ALWAYS been my fave of the three. In fact, behind the original Night Of The Living Dead it is my second favorite movie of all time. I loved Raiders to death when I saw it back in 1981, but it was Temple of Doom that solidified my love of Indiana Jones, and it entrenched in me a love of action-fantasy cinema so deep that its influence is still apparent in everything I write. As an adult I can now see that it is an obviously darker, more intense film than the first, or the third, and I guess I can see why some folks might not dig on that, especially in a supposed “family/kids” movie. Whatever. I love every second of it. And I still demand that Short Round makes an appearance in the fourth film in 2005!

Spielberg and Co. seems to not care very much for Temple and it’s obvious in their discussions about the film in the Making-Of. George Lucas seems to be less ashamed of it than Spielberg, but neither really has many fond words for it. I really wish they would just stop whining about it. The movie has tons of fans, it was a huge hit at the box office, and as adventure filmmaking goes, it’s a superlative example of craftsmanship and filmmaking prowess. They should be proud of it and stop trying to appeal to the “sensitive masses” so much. So what if it’s dark and gory … screw the public of they can’t take it.

But those minor quibbles aside, I still say this was the sweetest DVD release of 2003. This is the movie trilogy I adore the most (sorry Romero and Lucas) and just to have this package of goodies sitting on my shelf is enough to warm my heart and set me humming that immortal theme song the whole live-long day!

Buy it NOW …

He’s a "Fiend From Beyond Time!" and he’s also known as Baron of Terror! He's The Brainiac! Evil occultist burned at the stake in 1661 by the Inquisition, hitching a ride on a passing comet at the last minute, vowing revenge on the ancestors of those who executed him! Only to return three hundred years later, pissed off and ready for carnage! And hungry for brains!

This is another one of the $4.99 DVDs my brother rescued from the bargain bin one cold, December night. This is classy, campy stuff here, folks. One of the goofiest Mexican horror treats this side of Santo! If you don’t have a good time with this, you need to check your pulse.

When the Baron returns to Earth after his joyride on the aforementioned comet, he has metamorphosed into a hideous ratlike THING. He can change into his human form when needs be, but when he gets hungry for brains, watch out! Sure, watching the evil dude feast on ice-creamy looking brains is nifty enough, but the real treat is watching him attack his victims by slapping his rubbery tongue against the sides of their faces and sucking out their grey matter. Thank God for cutaways, friends, so we don’t have to witness the horror of what we KNOW is happening. We can hear the sounds, catch the glimpses of that tongue slapping away … Don’t tell me they couldn’t afford brain-sucking effects! The directors MEANT for us to rely on our imaginations!

I hope that makes sense. Watch it, you’ll know what I’m getting at. A maladroit, slapping rubber tongue thing. It’s perfect. It’s sweet. It’s what life’s all about. Give me The Brainiac over Matrix Revolutions ANYDAY!

(Ryan Lies is a staffwriter for No-Fi "Magazine" and changes into his human form nightly.)

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Elephant
starring Alex Frost, Elias McConnell, directed by Gus Van Sant, Color, , 2003
Distributed by HBO Films/Fine Line
DVD Reviewed By: Claire Donner

With his most recent effort, Gus Van Sant sloughs off all of his usual sentimental moralizing and bitchy cleverness to create a seamless, grim, and perhaps totally amoral work of art describing the Oregon school day leading up to a Thurston High School-like student shooting. Elephant does not create heroes and villains, tragic or otherwise, nor does it posit causes or cures for the chain of events that lead to tragedy. Its contribution to the ongoing Columbine-spawned dialogue is simply that such things may be fundamentally unexplainable, and thus, unavoidable.

The camera follows one character after another in a series of preternaturally patient virtuoso tracking shots, moving with grim steadiness through the halls of an Oregon high school. Each character is as well-defined as any randomly-selected student would to any other; an assortment of guileless improvised performances by young unknowns contributes to the film’s unsentimental authenticity in no small way. One is presented with virtually every detail of this day in the life, from the grave and intimate to the seemingly meaningless; sometimes moments are repeated in order to establish every possible point of view of even the most mundane interaction, sometimes in slow motion as if new evidence might be extracted from between frames. The camera scrutinizes every detail of a person’s face, his clothing, his gestural vocabulary, his responses to stimuli. In darkened corridors a girl discusses an ominous doctor’s appointment with a boyfriend; in a sunlit classroom students myopically debate visible evidence of homosexuality; a young punk develops his film in a dark room; in a bathroom, a sullen youth picks spitballs from his clothing and hair. As one student moves aimlessly through the halls, ambient noise is overwhelmed by a sound that is not music, a blend of human voices and jazz hooks and white noise, a sound that is as vivid an emulation of undirected human thought as any film has born in recent memory.

One might think that such an impossibly intimate investigation of a real event could reveal a key to understanding why and how tragedy comes about, that from it one could produce a sure preventative strategy. Mr. Van Sant does not entertain such fantasies, but rather insists that the impossibility of truly understanding or predicting human violence is as certain as the fact that entropy will produce it. Elephant generates a sensation of dread and inevitability of almost Lovecraftian proportions. The longer the camera pores over the anonymous, undistinguished environments, the less we know about how they will affect an individual psyche. The closer we get to individuals, the less we are able to see what is behind or before them. To attend to one thing is to forfeit awareness of another. As we gaze at a student’s face the room around her blurs and contorts. As we focus on a victim, his assailant wavers and fades. Yet and still, no matter how many times a moment is revisited, it remains the same; even if we cannot see more than the back of a head, the camera glides onward with eerie assurance; outside, jet streams score the sky and fade, clouds congeal and dissipate, day turns to night.

After a long string of trashy urban fairy tales, Gus Van Sant has crafted a startlingly lucid portrait of the course of tragedy that is somehow more honest than Michael Moore’s documentary claim to an empirical formula for human cruelty. Though declaredly fictitious, Elephant is as inscrutable and unavoidable as the real-life event it describes.

(Claire Donner is a writer for No-Fi "Magazine" and a member of every militia.)

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Ghosts...Of The Civil Dead
starring David Field, Vince Gil, Nick Cave, directed by John Hillcoat, Color, , 1988
Distributed by Umbrella Entertainment
DVD Reviewed By: Claire Donner

Australian director John Hillcoat’s first film (one of only two) is a work of what he calls “faction”, fiction steeped in the facts of real-life tragedy -- in this case the disastrous effects of social instability and administrative corruption within the prison system. GHOSTS...OF THE CIVIL DEAD is structured around segments of a report created by a Committee on the Judiciary examining the escalation of inmate violence that lead to the 37-month lockdown of maximum security Central Industrial Prison (based on the permanently locked-down Marion in Illinois). The opening passage states, “The reasons for this escalation are not the subject of this report, although the actual incidents have been well documented.” Contrarily, Hillcoat’s preference for paranoid conspiracy theory drives him to treat the violence with a strange casualness - excising outbursts of horrifying violence from surrounding events, or thrusting his audience directly into the bloody melee without a care as to what catalyzed it or if it will end - in order to focus instead upon the minutiae of prison social structure and uncover the impetus behind its disintegration. Whether or not one buys the grim political assertions herein, Hillcoat’s investigation results in a heady bank of sturm and drang so dense as to inflict upon many an audience the kind of psychological injury and violent physical reaction one would expect of a film overwrought with the visceral shocks Ghosts largely avoids.

Central Industrial is one of many “new generation” prisons, humane penal institutions that house inmates in candy-colored cells decorated like dorm rooms and allow a progressive degree of freedom of movement about the building. Within these walls, a population of decaying addicts, rough trade and ink-riddled Neanderthals has established a kind of dirty harmony with crooked correctional officers. Rouged Lilly weaves calmly through a seething crowd of potential johns. Small-time Mafioso Waychek admires his jewelry and patiently awaits a delivery of cocaine from a corrupt screw while enjoying video of male strippers at work and play. A mute diminutive long time man crafts an unimaginably detailed model ship from minute wooden scraps. Everyone knows what to expect of each passing day of their sentences. However, this delicate balance is gradually corroded by an influx of hardcore subversive psychopaths who need more than the new generation’s kinder gentler brand of behavioral correction – a deliberate act of hostility, if Hillcoat is to be believed – and as the rules of this societal microcosm are turned inside out, tension mounts until restraint can no longer be maintained by any of its factions.

But the insidious administration responsible for this destructive decision remains faceless, its intentions only revealed through the pithy ruminations of the prisoners, and Hillcoat never presumes that the underpinnings of human violence and degeneration can be understood by simply analyzing their external manifestations as the central Committee document does. So, while the film could be sending the audience on a juvenile thrill ride through the actual mechanics of a riot, it instead allows a stifling intimacy with the emotional climate at Central Industrial, which in some ways proves to be a far more sickening experience. Music seeps in ceaselessly through every crack, warped by blown speakers and bizarre acoustics and a thousand other voices into a kind of anxious gurgling static that fills the set like miasma. Above this rises the relentless shrill baying of the new breed of incurable psychotics (could be rabid young prince of darkness Nick Cave in one of the film’s most powerful performances), sending fight-or-flight signals coursing through the neurons of cons and screws alike at all hours. An agitated gang seizes and violates a naïve young offender, and Hillcoat elides the event itself to focus on the victim’s broken anatomy and in particular his withdrawn, fractured countenance in the aftermath. The most information the audience ever receives comes from the near-constant stream of inner monologues belonging to a remarkable number and variety of figures, sometimes overpowering the actual progression of a concurrent crisis (which of course affords the viewer the highest possible degree of intimacy with the players). When the riot that incurs the lockdown finally comes about, one is thrown directly into the center of the gruesome action without any sense of how it started or how it will end. Although the grizzly visions of the perforated bodies of police officers will not soon be forgotten, the true focus of this scene is a series of portraits of each face in the crowd. Whether or not Hillcoat’s rather terrifying conspiracy theories regarding the disturbance of the social order hold water, he intuits the experience of its victims with astonishing lucidity, and the effect of this meditation is more potent than a simple portrayal of the sensational events Ghosts documents.

GHOSTS...OF THE CIVIL DEAD is brought back to us after twenty-five years by Umbrella Entertainment in the form of a lovingly programmed DVD with an overwhelming selection of extras. The score and script make this a must for any fan of Mr. Cave, and his brief brutal performance in the film hints at what must have made The Birthday Party the most notoriously violent act in its native Australia. Fancy meeting God?

Some days I’m just flabbergasted by the sheer number of movies that have been made over the years since the advent of cinema. I mean, there seems like there’s a billion of ‘em! Every week, so many new titles are released on DVD, stuff even I’VE never heard of, and I’m thinking...will they ever run out of movies to release?

I digress. Truth is, I love discovering flicks I’ve never seen or heard of, especially the kind you can find sitting in the bargain bins at your local department store. Besides the countless shoddy versions of Little Shop of Horrors, The Terror and Night of the Living Dead, there are some real gems that just somehow slipped through the proverbial cracks. Just waiting to leap into your paws for the low-low price of $4.99.

Crash Of The Moons is just such a flick. I’d never heard of this one, but my brother found it (along with another one called The Brainiac, which I will review later) and snatched it up. Trough it at me when he walked in the door, spilling my Cap’n Crunch all over the place. My face lit up. That night, I watched ‘em both.

Crash Of The Moons is pure 50s space adventure cheese. But good cheese. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a “so bad it’s good” kinda way. This flick is actually pretty entertaining. It’s silly, dated and the special effects budget was probably less than that of most public access shows, but so what. There’s a decent, diverting, if somewhat shallow, storyline and everything proceeds along with a naive charm that is the hallmark of many of these old Saturday-afternoon time-wasters.

What do you want to know? Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, must save the day when he discovers that a roving, “gypsy moon” is on a collision course with another planet. Tensions flare, men of science furrow their brows in consternation as they try to understand “how they could’ve overlooked such a thing.” The space vixens bat their eyes at the stalwart heroes. The rocket ships look like cardboard cutouts being pulled along on string. They even throw in an anti-fascist message! It’s all there. I loved it.

This “movie” is actually a collection of episodes of the Rocky Jones television show, which ran on NBC many moons ago (Ha! That was good), smashed together into one white-knuckle, intergalactic thrill ride! Well, anyway, it might not be really all that good at all, but dammit, I loved the heck out of it. As far as I’m concerned, special FX technology NEVER needed to advance beyond 1954! Screw CGI!

And it was only $4.99. Screw YOU if you can’t get $4.99 worth of enjoyment out of it!