Santa Claus conquers the Martians 1964 Review

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Beam me up, Rudolph 

Well, I woke up this morning and realized it had been a while since I talked to my old friend ‘reality’, but when I called that tricky mistress she just reminded me of the massive restraining order she had placed on me ever since I started to review movies, so here’s to the Christmas spirit: “Santa conquers the Martians” …in January.

Yes, I’ll have to apologies once more for my lack of reviews the past weeks, due to pesky family members and their silly traditions and habits, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna watch a movie about Martians kidnapping Santa.

Yes, this little trainwreck of a movie was introduced in 1964, and although the title is slightly misleading, it does involve space travel with the fatmeister himself, Santa Claus.

On Mars (never a good sign when a review starts with these two words) the Martian children are obsessed with earth’s broadcasts and culture, especially around Christmas when the good little boys and girls of earth get all kinds of goodies. The Martian adults are worried for the wellbeing of their children and decide that the best way to deal with this issue is to kidnap the fatman and force him to work on Mars to make toys.

Well, if you manage to read all that without banging your head against any kind of surface, you’ll notice that one, Santa doesn’t really conquers anything (well, technically he does, in a Christmas spirit kind of way), and two, this is in no way a horror/action or anything that I would normally review, but to be fair, I’m gonna make an exception for this one just on the name alone.

But yes, this movie is incredibly silly, but I get the idea that the creators actually meant for it to be a charming family picture, which makes me feel kind of bad for them when this movie had me laughing at just how incredibly bad it is.

At first I was hoping that they would go at it in a comedic angle, so that when they come to earth they pick up a mall Santa and highjinx ensue, but they actually kidnaps the real Santa, and two little annoying brats so the little drool-monsters watching this mess can identify I guess. And the whole world is in an uproar, meaning they knew Santa was real, so is this movie meant for children under the age of four? Well I sure as hell hope not, it’ll scare the living hell out of them when strange men painted green in thigh spandex and silly hats walk in the room with their robot made out of tin foil, oh wait, that’s just me and my very specific and somewhat disturbing phobia.

 But yes, the props and the effects are bad, and when I say that, I mean that the kindergarten plays next door looked more believable. But damn if it isn’t entertaining to watch.

At some point in the movie a guy with a long fur coat and a hat slightly resembling something that might have once been a polar bear costume walks in the set and we’re actually supposed to believe that it’s a bear?

But wait till you see the robot the Martians use to attack the north pole, he came in the night, two bright lights in the distance and walked toward the large papier-mâché rocks in all its cardboard glory as I fell to the floor gasping for air so I could somehow laugh harder. Sweet Jesus, if the props would be an actor, they’d be Tommy Wiseau, so bad it hurts in all the good places. I want to find the guy who made the costumes and hand him an award, because god knows we need the challenged persons to feel good about themselves.

Is Santa Claus Conquers the Martians any good? Oh god no, but that didn’t stop me from having fun. It’s a hidden cult classic that manages to do everything wrong and it’s damn enjoyable to see. You might think it’s strange but I actually do recommend watching it, then again, I like bad movies as long as they can keep me entertain.

So yeah, give it a watch if you come across it and feel bad for the people that actually put money into making this movie.

And merry Christmas guys, thanks for sticking with me and these silly movies.

Personal Rating: 6.5/10

Critical Rating: 2/10

Things I’ve learned from “Santa Claus conquers the Martians”:

- Santa bear is a 'thing' apparently.

- The fact that the Martians didn’t even ponder on the question of how Santa was going to breathe on Mars, let alone not explode smearing giblets of gory joy on the faces of the little Martian children quickly realizing something might be wrong, makes me wonder how the hell they even managed to build a spaceship, although then again, how hard can it be to make one out of  cardboard and tin foil.

Robo-Geisha 2009 Review

Robo-Geisha

Suck it 90’s ‘Tank Girl’, this is the real thing.

Well, about time I review another movie from my favorite country: Japan.  And yes, this movie is weird…Really ass-bugging-Stomp-on-the-face-and-drives-of-a-cliffs-only-to-pop-up-in-front-of-your-window-at-3-am-whispering-something-about-killer-turtles-while-you-only-wanted-a-glass-of-water weird.

Are you afraid? Well, you better be, cause here’s Robo-Geisha

Released in 2009 by Noboru Igushi , this proves my point that japan isn’t just crazy, it’s a new kind of crazy bred in a lab somewhere only to escape in nothing but a yellow mankini and slap people in the face with a dead fish.

Ever wondered what would happen if you mixed ‘The Terminator’ with ‘Memoirs Of A Geisha’ and ‘Godzilla’ and a whole lot of meth? Well, here’s your answer:

An ultra-violent weird and insane trip filled with out of place humor and nonsensical fight scenes between geisha’s and robots, ninja’s, giant robot castles and a nurse…for some reason.

What is this movie really about? Well, these kind of movies often don’t really have much of a story, the humor and value are based more on how much they can get away with. But with Robo-Geisha, there is surprisingly more story than needed. It tells the tale of two sisters, the elder being a geisha and the younger being pretty much Cinderella with major anger issues. Let’s just say they don’t get along, and it doesn’t help that this perfect young guy with a major bank account is more interested in the younger sister, Yoshi (yeah, I know, just roll with it). They both get invited to his company where we learned that he is an evil villain who wants to take over the world with his father and do evil stuff like stomping on puppies and laughing at sick kids and all that evil business.

Thus the two sisters are recruited to his army of cyborg Geisha assassins. And instead of saying:

 “eh, I know you’re pretty much Cruella from the 101 Dalmatian with slightly better hair and a penis and stuff, and I can roll with that, but I’m probably gonna go now because of the serious case of ‘dying’ that everyone in your company has been getting lately”, the two sisters decide to turn the whole thing into a competition, killing as many as possible, getting better upgrades and taking the physical abuse like a boss to eventually become ‘The Very Best’.

Well, the movie decides that this plot is getting old somewhere halfway through and Yoshi gets betrayed by the Asian Ken doll and his company and left for dead at the side of the road. But of course, an older Winry from FMA just happens to pass by and gives her sweet upgrades. Thus Yoshi, now armed with the lower body of a tank and enough fire power to blow up the whole country, decides to open a can of whoop ass of biblical scale on the bad guy’s HQ, which has now become a giant Godzilla robot and who is destroying random building…which are bleeding when destroyed, yeah, I don’t even…

You thought i was kiding, didn't ya?

This movie is simply amazing, not because it’s good or anything, but because it’s so bad, but on purpose , which makes it ok, right?

But all kidding aside, I loved this movie. Never did I find myself bored or not laughing, it managed to hit every single note perfectly, even if hitting said note perfectly required to have some of the worse effects I’ve seen in a while, which in my case only entertained me more.

The intention was to make a movie so ridiculous as possible and I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the most ridiculous movie I’ve ever seen.

The only thing I can compare it to would be “Panty and Stocking with Gartenbelt”, the humor, pacing and ridiculousness is similar, but Robo-geisha takes it one step further in the ‘weird’ direction. Surprisingly, the story telling is also shockingly similar, teasing us with serious moments and drama, only to slap us in the face with an over the top nonsensical fight scene out of left field, as if the show and the movies were telling us: “yeah, we can to so much better than this, we could actually have a story, but f*ck that noise! Here’s a chick with tank wheels driving on the side of a building while playing a shamisen shooting lasers at a giant walking castle destroying the city”, and it works perfectly.

I spoke of the effects earlier, I think I didn’t do it justice when I said it was some of the worse I’ve seen in a while, cheap CGI bullets and blood that flies everywhere across the screen without rhyme or reason, pretty similar to the “Violent Shit” movies (in case you don’t know any of them, trust me when I say it’s pretty bad and in no way a compliment). The practical effects are over the top and works perfectly for the goofy tone this movie was going for, like some guy with shrimps shoved in his eyes or a man being hit so hard his head retracts back into his torso, you know, all the good stuff.

The dialogue…do I need to say anything else than an example early on in the movie where a man is told an assassin is going to kill his within three minutes:

- “Kill me in three minutes? Three minutes is as much time as you’ve taken a dump but you’ve still got like, faint bits of shit sort of smearing at the toilet, right?”

I rest my case.

I don’t know what’s worse, that this movie has everything from butt-shurikens to acid breast milk, or that I was laughing at every single immature joke this movie was throwing at me. Ah well, final verdict? If you like Japanese humor, give it a watch, and if you’re not familiar with Japanese humor, you might want to approaches  this one carefully but I still highly recommend it, only for the sheer ridiculousness and because it might be one of the most random thing you’ll ever see.

Things I’ve learned from ‘Robo-Geisha’:

- Ass-play is taken quite literally in this movie.

- Everyone in this movie went to the same target practice as the Star Wars storm troopers.

- Grandpa be packing heat.

- Ass-swords…really movie? You just had to push it didn’t ya?

Personal rating: 8,5/10

Critical rating: 4,5/10

Teenage Caveman 2002 review

Teenage Caveman

There's not enough booze in the world to make me enjoy this movie...

Good god, just when you think you’ve seen the bottom of the barrel, the human stupidity just grows and spreads in the form of shameless, boring and above all, lazy pieces of feces that dares to call itself a movie. My point? Teenage Caveman, hearing that name already gives me a gag reflex.

Directed in 2002 by Larry Clark, who is mostly known for making shameless oversexed teenage drama’s. This straight to DVD sorry excuse for anything resembling a movie passed under everyone’s radar making it thankfully very obscure and pretty hard to find. Unfortunately I wasn’t lucky enough to ignore it and saw it one day in a store and looking at the cover I thought: “hey, this could be interesting”. It was only after having watched this creepy descend into a sick and disturbed pervert’s view on teenagers that I realized how god-awfully wrong I was.

How bad is it? Well, to be fair my hate probably comes more from the fact that I had high hopes after having seen the cover, which looked like one of those eighties/nineties goofy monster-on-the-loose movie about a caveman in modern times, kinda like the ‘Beer bad’ episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Unfortunately, my hopes were shattered in the very first minute of the movie. Wanna know what this movie is really about?

The story centers around a small group of teenagers in a post-apocalyptic world, why did they survive? How did the world end? Was there a nuclear war? We don’t know! dear ol’Larry didn’t think this was important or interesting enough to tell us, what do we get instead of an explanation? People living like caveman in tribes, oh wait, religious tribes! Even better, now the chief of the tribe can justify raping and pedophilia with the never failing argument “God wants it” Not kidding, that actually happens in like the first ten minutes, damn this movie is pissing me off already, and we haven’t even talked about the main ‘characters’.

So getting back on track, the son of the chief decides that he is sick and tired of this movie just as much as I am and murders his scumbag father and leaves with his retarded posy to find a new place to kick it. But the fellowship of degenerated idiots don’t get too far gets abducted by two new characters, let’s call them SluttyMcslut and Blondiecocain, who brings them to their lair located in the city where technology has advanced normally but the dress-code hasn’t. The group doesn’t have much time to marvel at the technology surrounding them that they realize their host’s intention: doing coke, sexing it up and party like it’s 1999. But after a while some of the group’s members start disappearing or blowing up for no reason whatsoever. They quickly realize that something is wrong but their hosts don’t seem to yield with their request to leave, and let them in on a little secret that is so stupid and forced that it will blow your mind.

If you couldn’t tell already, I really didn’t like this one. Maybe because the story makes no sense whatsoever, but mainly because this movie is just so boring… it’s written lazily, the acting’s horrendous and there is simply no quality to it. Don’t get me wrong, I like bad movies, hell, I love them. Movies like ‘The Room’ or even ‘Killer Pussy’ always amaze me with their badness and simple goofiness, however, I can’t stand it when a movie bores me. And that’s exactly what ‘Teenage Caveman’ did, it bored me to death, it really became a chore to sit through. Nothing happened for a good chunk of the movie, and when it did, it was so stupid that it just annoyed me.

The only redeeming factor to this entire movie might be Blondiecocain, played by Richard Hillman. The guy was having so much fun with the role it was hard not to chuckle every once in a while. The dude was quite literally munching the scenery (not kidding, at some point he actually does).

But was that Nicolas cage style of acting enough to save the movie? Hells no.

The effects are bad, the acting’s bad, the story is boring, there is an ridiculous amount of out-of-nowhere nudity that adds nothing to the movie except to prove my point that Larry Clark is a sick disturbed pervert, every technique that the movie throws at us in a feeble attempt to be ‘artsy’ fails horribly, everything I can think of makes this movie a huge waste of time.

The only reason I can think of why this movie had been made, is because it was originally meant to be a porno, but when they realized that most of their actors were underage they ended up with a soft core half-baked and lazy mess of a train wreck.

I honestly can’t recommend this movie to anyone, it’s a buried mess, and let’s hope that it stays that way. Stay away from this one folks, trust me.

  

Things Teenage caveman can teach us:

-It seems they still have punk rock in the future, unfortunately they also have idiots who sing along.

- An Emo wolverine would look pretty stupid.

- It is possible to actually become stupider by watching a movie, believe me, I had a hard time remembering my name after this mess.

Personal rating: 2/10

Critical rating: 3/10

Video review:

Link: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qosrsl0wqhU