bootblacker

Piranha starts out as expected, stupid white people going to discover new lands and exploit them. I thought for a while it might be a cannibal film. It starts off like so many others, showing nothing but shots off untouched Amazon rain forest. For all I know it could be Florida. At this point you figure some animal mutilation or natives will pop up. Instead you get the acting talents of William Smith, who starred in L.A. Vice and Angels Die Hard. He plays Caribe, an acclaimed hunter, who I would describe him as Jack Palance Light. He is bigger in stature, but not quite the Jack Palance goodness. As for natives, you don't really get that many. Where's the piranha? Should I even ask that question? Caribe now hunts humans, I guess. He doesn't really pursue anyone till the end of the movie though, just stares at them. Caribe does race one of the tourists on a motorcycle in a over-dramatic Smokey and the Bandit kind of way. The motorcycle challenge happens for no real reason other than an action sequence. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a tourist challenge a stranger to a motorcycle race in the jungle. Never actually. Do they live, do they die? Will you care? Anybody wanna race on motorcycles? Caution: this film contains extreme dry look. My advice is to rent a Jack Palance classic like Craze.

A classic in the eighties genre of horror. It features goofy heavy metal music and demons. Stephen Dorff plays young Glen, who discovers a hole in his backyard is a doorway for demons. After his friend Terry plays his metal album backwords and they coincidently bury the family pet(you always need a sacrifice) in a hole in the backyard, they awaken demonic spirits which destroy the home and try to kill them. A funny take(even if not meant to be) on back masking and the influence of rock music on children. This film features some classic stop motion in the lines of Jason and the Argonauts. They are attacked by reanimating dead, droves of tiny demons and a head demon the size of a bus, which bares a strong resemblance to a Clash of Titans creature. This all stemming from a movie that would normally be a dud given the time period. It shouldn't be taken too seriously, but will amuse you for about 85 minutes. This is yet another underrated, hardly seen eighties gem.

Herschell Gordon Lewis' cautionary tale of wanting to be too cultured. Ramses, a shop owner with disturbingly large eyebrows, offers clueless white people a taste of old world Egypt in what is called a blood feast. This turns out to be a cannibalistic ritual needed to resurrect an ancient Egyptian deity. This movie gives you everything you'd expect and more. While using an over abundance of fake syrupy blood, shaking camera effects and plenty of severed body parts, it seems more bizarre than gorey. It does feature plenty of terrible single shot dialogue and a sparse single instrument score. This is the exploitation film that makes you love exploitation films.