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happy pride month to the greatest trans villain ever. i still think they should have kissed at the end.

Watched on Tuesday June 3, 2025.

Watched on Monday June 2, 2025.

very tempted to rate this even higher on of how criminally underseen this is. the character design of the witch and her cat henchmen and the robot goons are so fucking food and every single background painting is a masterpiece. this is good as hell!

the Shaw Bros should have made a Moby Dick adaptation with Ku Feng as Captain Ahab

Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 29, 2025.

Me when im contemplating Cubes

Watched on Wednesday May 28, 2025.

Liquid Television ass cinema

Incredibly charming and gentle absurdist comedy like a cup of warm tea right out of the samovar. In stark contrast to Rankin's acidic Maddin/Lang debut this one feels closer to a Jacques Tati film to me. Anyway it's cheap to make these kind of bare director comparisons and Rankin is definitely developing his own thing here and I'm in love with everything he's made so far. He's on my very short list of contemporary working directors that I'm actually excited about and I can't wait to see what he makes next.

Dumb as dogdick and funny as fuck, sometimes even intentionally! The P stands for Pussy.

Watched on Monday May 26, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

Great weapons! Great traps! Okay fights!

KUNG FU GORILLAS

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 23, 2025.

Donald G Jackson's Mad God

finally watched this all the way through after the last aborted attempt. visually it's really striking and cool but on a story level it's insanely turgid and i don't give a shit about any of these asshole. i think this could have been like an entire hour shorter and not lost anything of value.

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

exquisitely dumb

completely competent and serviceable but unremarkable V-cinema cop thriller. nobody uses a prosthetic leg as a bazooka so by default i have to rate this lower than the first Gun Crazy

Fantasy Mission Force minus most of the budget and charm and with a Bruce Le cameo instead of Jackie Chan. deeply baffling on every level and 100% worth watching.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

i used to call this one of my favorite films of the last decade but now that it's been so long i have to instead call it one of my favorite films of the last two decades. equal parts gorgeous and nasty and insanely funny. every fucking line is solid gold. i should really watch another movie by this director sometime. probably not the shark one.

cool to see the first iteration of the genre that would eventually culminate in The Boxer's Omen and also some very early and cheap hand-drawn wizard lasers that would be perfected in a few years by Chor Yuen et al.

unfortunately despite the combined charisma of Ti Lung, Lo Lieh, and Ku Feng in a silly wig this was mostly boring as shit, with very few special effects of note aside from one cool shot of worms thrashing under a woman's skin and a couple stop motion decompositions. hopefully the sequel is better.

insane tonally and frequently gorgeous. never seen an erotic hara-kiri scene before!

extremely mean and tense thriller in the guise of a siege film. my partner made me turn it off 15 minutes in the first time i tried to put it on because it was too much of a downer. also i instantly clocked one of the fascist goons as Philadelphia Collins from Trailer Park Boys just by his gut.

Delightfully stupid and shameless star wars ripoff from one of the kings of italian schlock. Love the production design and laser effects. The evil space count looks like that nostalgia critic guy

essential viewing for fans of hand-drawn laser effects. i love that Cozzi and Ferrigno had a Corman/Price style relationship and it's a bummer to me that they only made three of these films, though to be fair they clearly took a lot more time and money to make than the Poe cycle. but just imagine a whole series of Lou playing different mythological figures running around Cozzi's insane psychedelic setpieces battling assorted wizards and stop motion monsters. tantalizing.

Could have done without the 8 minute opening credits/highlight reel from the last film. seems unnecessary!

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

I like the dichotomous animation style between the forest and its critters and the awful teddy bears, and i'm not above enjoying the Happy Tree Friends style mix of saccharine character designs and ultraviolence. that said the endless miserable nihilism did eventually get on my nerves by the end and speaking of which i can't tell if i'm too dumb to understand how the story ties together or if it really is just kind of a mess. like we got the Full Metal Jacket thing going on and also the Princess Mononoke thing, but also the story of Cain and Abel and all of that leads to the creation of humans when the psychotic self-hating teddy bear kills the last unicorn as foretold by the monkeys that live in the ruins of a cathedral? i can kind of grasp what its going for around the edges as a sort of tone poem about the horrors of francoist spain, but not being spanish or catholic am probably missing some cultural context that would make it gel more at the end.

honestly I enjoy the nu metal music video photobash dieselpunk soviet aesthetic they went for and the maximalist approach of just constantly fucking around with different ways of filming and editing and animating every scene. even the enveloping CGI slop works when it's fully leaned into and stylized to push the live action manga angle. in a lot of ways this reminded me of Anno's 2004 Cutie Honey adaptation which I'm a fan of and strongly suspect was worked on by many of the same people. but maaaaaaaaan why is this movie so fucking long? i swear at least 60 of the 140 minute runtime is just people doing sephiroth monologues at each other.

story was whatever but goddamn that technicolor is beautiful, especially the scenes in the pirate bar. shit looks like a damn oil painting.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

i've seen them both multiple times each but i sill constantly mix this and TC2000 up. not a complaint though, i'd be happy if there were a hundred dumb as dirt 3-star Billy Blanks cyber action films.

not even the PM touch can make me care that much about this kind of boxing movie

honestly if this was made any time before like 1995 it would probably be a 5 from me but that 2009 CGI and just the overall late 2000s aesthetic sensibilities totally ruins it for me. even the live action parts somehow look like a shitty video game cutscene. that said it was really fun to see like 200 rubber suits brought out of storage for the big monster mash.

Watched on Thursday May 1, 2025.

my new hypothesis is that Bertrand Mandico saw the labyrinth scene in this as a child and it rewired his brain chemistry forever. this would explain like 90% of his visual aesthetic.

i saw this movie once like 15 years ago on a dogshit VHS rip and probably blackout drunk and didn't appreciate it at all. in my memory this was a cheap buck rogers themed skin flick like Flesh Gordon (which i also love to be clear) but no this is a fucking work of art. every set and prop in this film, of which there's an astounding number, brings me so much joy to look at. also it's just generally a very fun and funny horny adventure romp. five stars fuck the haters.

pretty fun! especially the GWAR-ass ending. should have been, like, 40 minutes shorter though.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

jesus fucking christ!!!!

GAMS GAMS GAMS GAMS GAMS

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

of the whole genre of postironic edwoodian creature features (Riverbeast, Cadavra, etc) i think this might be my new favorite. especially watching with a group this was a fuckin hoot

80s hong kong/taiwan bonkers ass high fantasy films were the peak of cinema. wizard duels! hand-drawn lasers and fireballs on the film! hell yeah!

get em while they're hot: here's s for my top 30 or so films in this genre until i need the drive space back or the wuxia police kick down my door:
drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1j3V_2tega4uyF4XzmtR3lUcIg7IyQuKY

• The Battle Wizard
• Buddha's Palm
• Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain
• The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains
• Bloody Parrot
• The Miracle Fighters
• The Beheaded 1000
• The Hidden Power of the Dragon Sabre
• Holy Flame of the Martial World
• Portrait in Crystal

...plus 73 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

grouped by star rating, largely unranked within those

• Godzilla
• Godzilla vs. Hedorah
• Godzilla vs. Destoroyah
• Godzilla vs. Biollante
• Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah
• Mothra vs. Godzilla
• Godzilla vs. Megalon
• Godzilla vs. Mothra
• Destroy All Monsters
• All Monsters Attack

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

top 66 movies that resonate with me on a deeply fundamental level

• The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
• The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• Aliens
• The American Astronaut
• Bad Boy Bubby
• The Baron Against the Demons
• The Beheaded 1000
• Big Trouble in Little China
• The Black Tavern

...plus 56 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

many of these are first-time watches but i also included a number of rewatches either because it had been a very long time since i saw them (DEEP RISING, THE ION OF JOAN OF ARC) or because i gained a new appreciation for them this time (VERSUS, PHANTASM) or just because i really really fucking like them (NEMESIS, RIKI-OH)

• The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
• The Baron Against the Demons
• The Bells of Death
• The Black Tavern
• Bloody Parrot
• The Boxer's Omen
• Buddha's Palm
• Crippled Avengers
• Deep Rising
• Drive

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.