For the most part, Eliminators is like Star Wars on an A-Team budget, but the comparisons don’t stop there.
Produced by low budget sci-fi maestro Charles Band, the movie is a savvy exercise in cultural marketing which taps into a plethora of 80s hits and features the kind of characters which probably would have resulted in a successful toy range were its financial aspirations just a tad higher . . .
Breeders is like one of those old monster movies with a giant erection.
Another in a long line of exploitation flicks given the bluray treatment, it is the story of a giant fly who sets about raping a cast of airheaded delectables with the intention of expanding its species. Able to take the form of any human it comes into contact with, it seeks out virgin victims and impregnates them with a black, gooey substance, while using acid to burn them for reasons which are never quite explained…
A sequel that lives up to an original picture is a rare thing indeed. Even rarer is one that in some ways surpasses it, but James Cameron seems to have the formula down to a tee.
In 1991 he in many ways bested his own sci-fi epic The Terminator with Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and a few years prior he took Ridley Scott’s seminal space horror Alien and made Aliens, which for many is the superior movie of the franchise…
Back in 1982 Tobe Hooper directed Poltergeist, a movie that was written and produced by Stephen Spielberg, and in all honesty it may as well have been him behind the camera. Everything about that movie screamed Spielberg, from its familial tone and grandiose set pieces to its high profile marketing strategy and tantilsing teaser poster. The grisly touch of Hooper – a wonderful director in his own right – was nowhere to be found.
Long before Amazon and Facebook turned us all into hermits, shopping malls were our cultural epicentre.
Each weekend teenagers would flock in their legions, hanging out at their favourite arcades or fast food restaurants and marvelling at the colourful array of consumer products that were not yet accessible at the click of a touchpad. Inevitably, these monuments to consumerism became schoolyards away from home…
It is perhaps ironic that one of the most nostalgic movies of the 1980s acquires its sense of sentimentality from an entirely different era.
Based on Stephen King’s short story The Body, Stand by Me is an intoxicating ode to the ’50s with a tragic underbelly that belies the myth of what on the surface of things could be considered simpler times…
Back in the 1980s a trip to the video store was an experience in itself.
In a era before widespread graphic design, movie production companies relied on a more traditional art form in order to promote their pictures, employing canvas artists to turn their predominantly low budget VHS Vehicles into the kind of visual spectacular that would leap off the shelves amidst an oversaturated market…
Deadly Friend is a confused mess of a movie.
It is part horror, part science fiction, part drama, part comedy, and doesn’t quite deliver on any one of those levels. Part of this was due to studio interference. Much of the plot was altered following a screen test in which the audience complained of a lack of gore, expecting something else entirely from a man who only a year earlier had unleashed Freddy Krueger onto the horror landscape…
At some point during the mid 1980’s the whole world turned neon.
Every boiler room shootout or smoke strewn alleyway inexplicably glowed with it. We had neon fashion, neon nightclubs and cocktails. We even had a fifty-eight year old Roger Moore shooting Lasers at neon painted women in one of the most underwhelming Bond movies of all time…
