Dead Heat(1988) with Beyond Friday

The trouble with making these posts so late is that it's hard to recall the experience of watching movies in great detail. I'm gonna get stuff wrong too so I'll have to work on that.

It was the end of March two years ago when we watched this. It had zombies, zombies with Uzis(which I called zombuzis), Vincent Price, a big weird dude named Doug who said big weird dude things like "ah'm gonna hurt him" and it played out in fabulously entertaining way.

There was a weird contraption that brought people back from the dead. I may be wrong but there was dramatic Danny Elfman Batman music that played when the contraption was on screen. It was an interesting tone shift from the rest of the movie.

The rest of the movie features its buddy cop protagonists with snazzy action and making snazzy quotes(there seemed to be a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail... "flesh wound" quote maybe?)

They get tangled in this plot about people coming back from the dead. Vincent Price appears in a tape with some very nice exposition.

One of the main guys is Doug, who's just a big weird interesting fun dude. I was always drawn to seeing what funny big weird dude thing he was going to say or do next.

What else can I remember about this... there was someone who was trying to do sewing while they were driving for some weird reason and there was a fight scene in a hallway where neither dude seemed to be getting hurt or showing signs of dropping dead. Maybe they were zombies? I dunno. I should probably watch this again sometime as it was a lot of fun.

Prophecy(1979) With Beyond Friday

Cocaine Bear would have to wait for a small while. Before I got a chance to see that I watched this film with the Beyonders, which also featured a bear killing everybody. However, the bear in Prophecy was a monstrosity deformed as a result of human industrial activity and pollution from mercury waste.

The bear in this movie isn't cuddly looking. It's lost all its fur due to the pollution and just looks like a wrinkly slimy fleshy mess with claws and teeth. It's disgruntled because at one point the humans have its cub they rescued from the water. The cub is a screaming wrinkly slimy fleshy mess with claws and teeth, yet its mother wants it back. One of the humans is a pregnant lady who looks at this horrifying thing with a broody look on her face. Mothers are kinda nuts.

The movie starts out with shaky torchlight footage in the darkness and the heavy sounds of a dog panting. Then there's a flash of the creature murdering its first victims. Unfortunately there's lot of this kind of thing in the movie itself. Much of it can be quite atmospheric but it does wear out.

For the longest time in the first half of the movie there's not much action until a distempered raccoon attacks the doctor and his wife in the cabin they stay at. I joked around and said this was my second-cousin once-removed Distempered Donie (RIP Donie). This raccoon had to carry a lot of the film when things were quiet but it wasn't enough. 

This doctor figures out the link between the polluting plant and the monstrous animals. He comes across a huge fish and tadpole in his investigation. Everyone pointed out how weird it was when he told his wife to touch the mercury on her boots with her bare hands. It was really weird. Don't tell anyone to do that ok. That stuff is dangerous.

Another party in this movie are the native Americans who protest the industry-mongers and I'm just recalling a scene where they block the vehicles and the boss makes one of his staff rev a chainsaw up close to one of their faces in order to scare them. That was pretty intense and it was said this movie got a PG rating. Wow.

Some kids appear early on as well and Beyonders were calling for them to get owned by the bear. This happened eventually when one was zipped up in a yellow sleeping bag and got tossed before exploding into feathers like some kind of weird piñata. That was pretty funny.

Eventually it becomes time to take the bear on, leading to a climactic fight. There was one really weird sequence where the bear goes underwater and makes fart-like bubbles while it's in there. Everybody just stands and stares at it like eejits until the bear emerges and goes after them again. 

During the climactic fight the characters run into their last stronghold and it got weirdly quiet before the bear burst through the roof, which made me laugh as we didn't need any more quiet moments. The fight reaches its conclusion. Oh yeah and it ruled when the boss got owned, mustn't forget that.

For a snack I had Aero Peppermint Mini Eggs. I was expecting them to be more or less like the Bubbles variety, and they were, but they were absolutely dotey little minty mini eggs and they looked like the pills from Dr. Mario. I found them to be perfectly bite sized as well. Try them out especially if you like the Bubbles!

Barb Wire with Beyond Friday

Pamela Anderson is back with a new documentary on Netflix called "Pamela, A Love Story". I haven't watched it yet but I have watched Barb Wire, which has also been added to the Netflix catalogue for one month only, likely as a companion piece. It was a good chance for us to make a watch party out of it.

I haven't seen the movie since the 90s, when she was a major heartthrob for me and everyone I knew growing up. Back then we watched it on a VHS tape rented from the petrol station or the video van all together in one sitting room, like we did with the Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Super Mario Bros movies. The Power Rangers movie was another big one for us, but I digress.

Looking at Pamela Anderson's character in the movie now, she is a work of art. Everything about how she looks, her eyes, hair, lips, teeth, breasts, she looks extremely beautiful, glamorous and well-lit, like she was made for the camera. She has this fearsome, lion-like aesthetic that makes her look powerful and made us weak at the knees back in the day. We obsessed over her breasts and she was a sensation in mainstream media. She was everywhere. Today we have wider access to media and we don't see her as often. Her beauty in this movie hits different. It's very nostalgic, but she still looks like a goddess.

The movie looks amazing as well and everyone agreed on the lighting. Movies back then had much better lighting than they do now. The part where the lighting brings out Barb's eyes I was comparing to the lighting of Bela Lugosi's eyes in the classic adaptation of Dracula. I was also drawing a comparison between her and Barbara Windsor, who had similar aesthetics and also had a character in EastEnders who owned a pub, often reminding everyone whose pub it was.

For snacks I had chocolate biscuit cake, also known as tiffin on the label. I also had Jaffa Cakes that were discounted. It was the Jacob's brand as well, so it was the good stuff.

We enjoyed this movie in the 90s, but since then it's been dumped on critically and I never really thought about rewatching it, but I feel now when I watched it with the Beyonders we really enjoyed it for what it was and especially for things it got right, particularly with the lighting, cinematography and general aesthetics.

We loved Pamela and her character. Seriously she was really cool and worth rooting for. There was this part where she had this MacGyver-like ingenuity to use a mattress to aid with some kind of plastic explosive detonation. I imagined the schoolyard back in the day where some lucky kid who got to rent the VHS before anyone else would boast about her "making the bed explode!"

Let's see... there are cool bits and sequences and I don't remember the whole thing but there are cool bits on their own. The junkyard crane fight, the bubble bath, the splashy pole dance in the opening credits... some narrative elements like the shot of the very red landscape, opening prologue and Barb revealing the year to be 2017. I commented this was what happened in an alternate timeline where the Nintendo Switch wasn't released.

So let's see... she's also a bounty hunter, she's the hero, her brother gets fridged by the bad guys in a gender reversal on that trope... Imagine if there was a Metroid movie in the 90s and she was in it... food for thought. I think she's a deserving action movie protagonist and it would be cool if there were more movies like this with her in the lead. She could rescue nerdy scientists or boys our age or something and we would all swoon and fawn over her.

Udo Kier is in this. I remember him from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Imagine a crossover, some big crazy weird 90s crossover.

We just had all had a good time with this movie! I felt we were righting a wrong with this revisit and appreciating what it is, making some good memories.

I'll end this with more daydreaming of Pamela Anderson's beauty and glamour. I'll have to check out her documentary too.

Robowar with Beyond Friday

Hello and welcome to the blog! I decided to start the new year with a new blog and talk about Robowar, the first movie of the year I enjoyed as part of Beyond Friday, a watch party I take part in with other movie fans on Twitter.

Robowar was a lot of fun. It features a group of soldiers going up against a humanoid robot in the jungle hunting them all down. It's very much a tasty combination of what Predator was like as well as other 80s movies like Robocop. There's a guy who looks a lot like Chuck Norris along with a bunch of other stereotypes in the group.

Some of the others were laughing at how the guy with the glasses was useless and a buffoon but I thought he was the coolest because he had the coolest hat, like you know one of those bucket hats with a wide brim for the sun? I love those hats. I admit it's not the best kind of hat to wear in a combat situation.

Anyway there's a lot of fun with guns and some of the scenes look really silly and entertaining, like there's this one part where one of the guys looks like he's been hiding his huge gun with a big jungle leaf and it's pretty funny.

The robot menace hunting them down makes these cool weird talking computer voice noises and turns its victims into cooked skeletal corpses. Some have jokingly remarked they looked like they were ready to eat. I kept comparing this robot to other 80s robots like Metal Gear from Snatcher or the Talking Computer toy many of us grew up with. 

The musical score was really cool but it also stayed fun and even got a bit silly with an 80s rock concert music track. It felt like a fun roller coaster thrill ride rather than something with the tension and horror of Predator. 

This movie was a lot of fun and everyone seemed to have a great time with it. It was fun comparing this movie to Tropic Thunder and Hot Shots Part Deux. It was directed by Bruno Mattei, a name I'm still getting to know but I have seen his movie about the rats, which was part of another watch party we had. I'll have to check out more of his stuff.