Nothing more than a collection of roughly two dozen unrelated sketches, The Kentucky Fried Movie succeeds most at skewering its own medium: American commercial cinema. Fake trailers mock the exploitation fads of the era with Cleopatra Schwartz (blaxploitation), That’s Armageddon (disaster movies) and Catholic High School Girls in Trouble (youth sex films); they’re so dead-on, […]
anthology
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Femme Fatales: The Complete Second Season
This second batch of episodes, 12 in all on two DVDs, seems more confident than Femme‘s freshman outing, even if story quality remains wildly varied. Tanit Phoenix (Safe House) hosts the proceedings, with scenarios that include: • a comic-book heroine, • time-traveling clones, • noir-drenched detectives • and so much moaning. For every leaden dud […]
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Terminator Anthology
Cameron’s The Terminator of 1984 was and is a well-made piece of sci-fi trash that bears the ingenuity-on-a-budget scars of most Roger Corman graduates. If it proved a breakthrough for Cameron (who then earned the Aliens gig as a follow-up), it was arguably double that for its monosyllabic center, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then considered near-inconceivable as […]
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Doomsday Book
Doomsday begins with the most fun of the bunch, “A Brave New World,” in which a nerdy, horny young man is upset that his family embarks on a fabulous getaway vacation without him, leaving a long list of chores. Many of them deal, unsettling enough, with food waste. He gets ill, and I’ll leave the […]
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V/H/S
The wraparound story gives this indie effort a loose framework to let multiple directors in on the fun: Camcorder-toting youths up to no damn good break into a house in order to steal some mysterious VHS tape for blackmail. In the place, they find a dead man lounging in front of a bank of TV […]
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New York Stories
While many omnibus films have been made in modern times, hardly any — at least in America — tout the caché of this one, letting directors Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) loose to each tell a story set in the city that has a million of […]
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The Theatre Bizarre
Six stories are introduced by Udo Kier (Melancholia) as a crusty-faced automaton who commands the stage of the title venue, with which a young, disturbed woman (Virginia Newcomb) living across the street is obsessed. Drawn there late one night, she takes a seat amid an audience empty except the occasional mannequins; Kier plays host with […]
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The Burning Moon
Not for nothing does its cover brazenly warn, “Uncut. Uncensored. Unconscionable.” Chances are you’d agree with all three, but the average person isn’t likely even to complete its trailer. Shot on video, “The Burning Moon” is not only a gorehound’s delight, but a German gorehound’s delight. To put it another way: those with framed covers […]
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Nine Nation Animation
Now that CGI is no longer a novelty, but something our eyes take for granted, the opportunity for true cinematic artistry falls to the kind that rarely unspools onto the big screen: the animated short. As the feature-length anthology “Nine Nation Animation” demonstrates, there’s no global shortage of experimentation in the field. Equipped with a […]