Reviews

Vegetarian goblins who look like humans but are ruled by bona fide goblins clad in burlap, as well as a deranged evil witch who seduces men with popcorn plan to eat whiny little boy Joshua's clueless family, visitors to the goblins' hometown of Nilbog, and Joshua's lunatic break-dancing sister's boyfriend and his idiot friends by luring them to ingest day-glo green colored food and bad milk which turns them into plants while Joshua's grandfather's ghost tries to alert Joshua of the imminent danger by continually appearing at random moments and occasionally providing bologna.

Recommended.

At times grating, at times hilarious, yet always exceptionally horrendous, Hobgoblins stands out for its immense stupidity and ineptitude. It fails so throughly in so many ways that it deserves a viewing based on that merit alone.

It's hard for a movie this bad to fail at being top quality trash, but Hobgoblins somehow manages to. Hobgoblins even fails to deliver some good ole-fashioned nudity, even when the story provides clear opportunities for it. The ultimate insult is when Amy, the main character's overly prudish, incredibly demanding and all-around despicable girlfriend, possessed by gremlins and overcome by her real subconscious urges to become a superslut, performs an impromptu strip act at Club Scum and (this is the insulting part) ... doesn't show any skin! What a failure. I would have subtracted five stars for that letdown alone were it not for the marvelous use of grenades that follows shortly after, a fantastic display in which one character gets blown up at point-blank range, and another goes up in flames and runs around screaming while on fire.

There are enough hilarious moments here to amuse trash seekers, though not enough to place Hobgoblins anywhere close to the top of their list. Mildly recommended.

Champion exploitation director Jess Franco provides another installment of his brief yet prolific jungle trash series with Diamonds of the Kilimanjaro AKA The Treasure of the White Goddess AKA a bunch of other titles. The movie shares a lot with the more notable Devil Hunter, another Franco flick from around the same era: some of the "native" music is the same, the cannibal-in-chief is the same actress in both movies, and the overall confused hodge-podge of half-baked themes is similar. Of course, there's also Franco's mandatory home-video style panning and zooming into random things (usually leaves), the totally inappropriate groovy jazz music, and that distinctive trash element that marks all of Franco's oeuvre.

Diamonds of Kilimanjaro has a deceptively complex plot, a story so confusing that a reasonable synopsis is impossible. A tribe of English-speaking island aborigines ruled by a drunken Scotsman kill all trespassers who attempt to steal their diamonds, except when convinced otherwise by their Goddess, Diana, a topless teenage white girl. Things get interesting when Diana's mother sends an assortment of bickering bounty hunters to return her daughter to civilization. When not arguing eternally over where they should cross the river, the rescuers develop alternate clandestine plans, including bringing back Diana but stealing the diamonds, not bringing back Diana and stealing the diamonds, murdering Diana and stealing diamonds, marrying Diana and bringing her back with the diamonds, marrying Diana but not bringing her back (forgetting the diamonds), and a few others. Just about everyone dies in the process of figuring this out, sometimes in the nude. At one point Jess Franco answers (again) the rarely asked question of whether it's possible to have a plot twist without having a plot to begin with.

Those who expected a Euro-cannibal fest here should have known better. In fact, anyone who knows Franco and expected something other than what he saw needs to have himself examined. Those seeking the ever-elusive Franco "gem" might be disappointed, as usual, but might find enough cheap thrills and mind-bending confusion to make Diamonds of the Kilimanjaro worthwhile.

In Ölüm Savasçisi ("Death Warrior"), action hero Cuneyt Arkin saves the world, turk-fu style, from gangs of sadistic ninja doppelgangers who attack defenseless civilians for fun, sometimes assisted by the Yeti. These deadly fighters are the product of a rigorous, almost non-stop training curriculum in which they observe continuous demonstrations by the Death Warrior and sometimes get killed in the learning process. Those who are tough enough to survive the ongoing and never-ending training sessions put their techniques to practice by brutally assassinating random innocent folks while the latter lounge around by the pool or listen to their favorite disco records.

Eventually, this mayhem comes to the attention of super-cop Cuneyt Arkin (star of "Dunanyi Kurtaram Adam"), who takes time off from hanging out at the beach to unleash a deadly can of whoop-ass upon the perpetrators in a fashion that eludes verbal description.

Ölüm Savasçisi is the kind of film that trash lovers dream about. It's the only un-subtitled foreign-language film that I have sat through twice in its entirety, not understanding a single word of dialog yet cherishing every mind-devastating moment. Highly recommended.

X-Men: The Last Stand is the simple story of about two-hundred different superheroes ("mutants"), each with his/her own special super-powers. There's a guy who shoots fire, a guy with nails coming out of his head, a really strong guy who lunges at people really hard, and another couple of hundred characters or so to keep track of. Some of these mutants have super-powers that are roughly equivalent to those of Jesus. Jean Grey, for example, can blow up an entire town just by thinking about it, and Magneto can throw cars around by pointing at them.

This movie has five plots. One of the plots is that there's now a "cure" for mutants that converts them into regular human beings. Naturally, most mutants are upset that their condition is being referred to as a disease, and there's much turmoil and disagreement amid the mutant community as to how to address the so-called cure, which results in several billion dollars worth of property damage.

One can't help but notice an attempt at drawing a parallel between the mutant cure in the X-Men's world and the recent claims of a cure for homosexuality in our own non-Marvel(tm) reality. The deep political message is that just because someone is different, it doesn't make him bad, and we shouldn't try to "cure" him. The problem with the parallel is that to my knowledge, homosexuals don't really have the power to shoot flames out of their fingers, or make my house explode just by closing their eyes. If they did, I'd definitely be a homophobe. So the analogy doesn't quite work.

Come to think of it, none of this movie works. The only saving grace of this flick is blue Fraser and that very sexy naked blue girl who's pretty bad-ass.

Who would have thought that blue people would be so cool?

Imagine a distant world in a forgotten era, a world where the good must struggle against the darkest evil. In this legendary world live an assortment of creatures that range from regular-size humans to different varieties of short people, some of whom can perform magic. It is a magical world where everything is completely predictable, and there are barely any women and no sexy people. This world is called Middle Earth.

You can learn all about Middle Earth by reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of The Rings trilogy, a story that shows Tolkien's desire to spend as much time away from his wife as possible. As a reading experience, it's akin to studying several History text books, only less interesting and you don't learn anything. The movie is fairly loyal to these ideas, and reinforces the attack on the innocent viewer with its expensive special effects and overwhelming, mind-numbing beauty.

Lord of the Rings is the story of a ring: the One Ring. You won't be forgetting this, trust me, as you will see many shots of it in the movie, usually in slow motion. There's another seven or eight rings too, but this one's The One. This ring is very, very powerful and hence very, very dangerous, so dangerous that most folk would succumb to it and become deranged freaks with distorted faces. It therefore makes sense that the chosen bearer of this ring should be Frodo, a lobotomized moron who can never quite figure out what the hell is going on, as emphasized by his never-ending dumbfounded facial expression, which we get to see (again in slow motion) approximately 300 times throughout the trilogy. This idiot is who we the viewers are supposed to relate to.

Now the main story goes like this: a crew made up of Frodo, his retard sidekick, an unshaven human, a dwarf, an archer who can't act (brilliantly played by Orlando Bloom), and some other people faking Irish accents set out on a journey to do whatever it is that had to be done with the One Ring. This entails fighting a whole lot of orcs time and time again. Even when you thought they were all dead, another 4000 orcs show up, always ready and willing to be killed in large numbers rather than simply commit suicide in the comfort of their homes. There's also Saruman and the similarly named Sauron, who play very important nondescript roles. As an interlude to each battle our friends go through, there's a slow motion scene of Frodo's idiotic expression as he stares at the ring for the fortieth time.

In summary: This movie is an ambitious attempt to end all humanity.