Joost_Hoedemaeckers

Blood Feast apparently derives its notoriety from basically two facts: 1. it has gore; 2. it is at least recognized as the first "splatter" movie, in that it showed visceral gore. Both are indeed facts in that they are true. But what else?

Is Blood Feast a good movie? Not really. The 1960's had already seen the in-your-face horror of Hitchcock's Psycho, but where that movie plays with the audience emotions in an intelligent way and is clearly a product of talented film making; Blood Feast is a prime example of cheap, exploitative and amateurish grind house film making. Maybe that is a merit in itself.

The gore serves as the only major attention drawer in a film with abysmal acting, camera use, sound and script. Only watch this if you're a fan of "so bad, it's good". And even then Blood Feast disappoints.

Stone's interpretation of the facts surrounding the JFK-case may not be 100% accurate...he surely delivers in creating an awe-inspiring thriller full of famous actors delivering some of the most wonderful performances of a group of star-actors in just one film...take The GodFather for example...

In this movie we get Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Donald Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Michael Rooker, Tommy Lee Jones and Sissy Spacek all delivering a memorable performance....to my opinion though the best performance is given by Joe Pesci as the neurotic highly edgy, and bordering on the edge of the insane David Ferrie (with indeed incredible wig!)....this is Pesci acting as he never did before...especially the 'interrogation'-scene in the hotel room...

JFK is Oliver Stone's view of the facts surrounding the Assassination...I read one of the two books it was based on, the Jim Garrison book about the assassination and the film follows the book quite well...actually, the title of the movie should have been: 'Jim Garrison: how I think Kennedy was killed'...

The film talks about one of the biggest mysteries in American history and is therefore bound to be the subject of speculation...some say, Stone doesn't report the facts or better yet, his movie is almost complete fiction!

What people are forgetting is that this is not Stone's vision but Garrison's vision MADE INTO A MOVIE by Stone...and as Garrison was one of the people who did the most thorough investigation into this whole case I think that the representation of the facts herein are pretty close to the truth, or at least from Jim Garrison's and Oliver Stone's point of view!

Now let's see who's going to make the first movie portraying the "magic-bullet-theory"!

"Pump up the Volume" is a very good feel-good movie and an attempt of hopping on the 'Breakfast Club' and 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High'-bandwagon... Slater performs well as the anarchistic 'Happy Harry Hard-On', the anonymous Pirate Radio DJ who invokes rebellion amongst the local high school youth and gets them to find their own voice in a world where they seemingly can't trust adults anymore... Although the characters have little depth (except maybe Slater) and the movie's plot isn't that difficult Slater's performance makes you want to go out and change the world yourself...it certainly provoked some feelings in me about my own angst.....but it falls a couple of clicks short of being an in-depth movie about teenage angst...it brisks the surface (and delivers very well) but never goes deeper than the kiddie pool...

And I love the song 'Wave of Mutilation' by the Pixies!