Six months later . . . . another moofie rant

I'm starting to think maybe I should start a brand spanking new blog to give me motivation to update it more regularly. Maybe next year.


Anyway, I've been working hard as a high school teacher and enjoying it, and I have been devouring films, books, comics, and music as much as I ever have, so here is another blog about a bunch of films I saw.


TROLL HUNTER


A Norwegian film in the style of 'The Blair Witch Project' and 'Cloverfield', but with much more of a sense of humour. 'Troll Hunter' tells the story of some film making kids who follow a real life troll hunter and unearth the world of trolls. The troll designs are fantastic, the curiosity and interest of a fictional 'real world' story are still there but they are married perfectly with a lot of laugh out loud jokes and fun. This was fantastic.


VAMPIRE GIRL VS FRANKENSTEIN GIRL


I'm hooked on cult Japanese films at the moment and it's all because of this one. I picked it up cheap on DVD and since I've been hunting and buying more gory treasures like this one.


'Vampire girl vs Frankenstein girl' tells the story of a teenage vampire who turns a boy she likes into a vampire through her Valentine chocolate gift. This boy's jealous bitchy girlfriend wants revenge, which leads to her death. Fortunately her crazy school principle father dresses up in Kabuki clothing and creates a living corpse, bringing her daughter back to life with some fun and morbid additions.


This film feels like a Japanese version of a Troma movie, complete with odd unP.C. kind of racist jokes involving a group of Asian girls who wish they were African American and so wear black face and prosthetics to look black. The gore is plentiful, the action is fast paced, and I had a huge smile on my face for the entire length of the film.


ROBOGEISHA


The title says it all. A huge corporation trains a bunch of females to become geisha assassins, using men's lust against them. For a film about geisha's there is very little nudity or sex in this film, if any. It's all about the training, the battles, and the tech. The geisha's are given robotic weapon upgrades that get more and more ridiculous as the film progresses, including a razor blade that comes out of the mouth, a machine gun breast, and a body that transforms into a tank. This was another fun gore fest of crazy Japanese proportions.


MUTANT GIRLS SQUAD


One more Japanese gore fest and then I'll move on.


A sweet, teenage girl starts to get an itchy hand on her 16th birthday. Then she finds out that she is in fact a mutant and her hand changes into a grotesque blobby mess that turns people into bloody messes easily. She joins a team of mutant girls led by a man in Peking Opera-ish face makeup. They fight against a team of anti-mutant government soldiers who wear these crazy masks where the huge noses shoot bullets. This was another joyful viewing for me that I will easily sit through multiple times.


RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES


We have been treated to so many great big budget films this year! While films like 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' have retarded titles and equally moronic storylines, a film like 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' shows that a big budget crowd pleaser can also be a well paced story with some nice drama elements.


'Rise...' acts as a prequel to the original Heston starring 'Planet of the Apes' and it is a good one. The reason for a race of intelligent apes existing makes sense, James Franco plays a likable enough guy, and we also get treated to a fair whack of David Hewlett (McKay from Stargate: Atlantis). The effects look fantastic, with Andy Serkis lending his emotive Gollum facial skills to Caesar, the main character Ape.


I hope this film is the first of many Ape reinventions, because unlike Tim Burton's unforgivable remake of 'Planet of the Apes', 'Rise..' actually adds something to the original material and is put together extremely well. I dug this a bunch.


Well, that's all for now.


See you in another 6 months...... hopefully before then.


jej