Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews, Television

Trash Culture’s Dr. Who Reviews – The Rescue (1965)

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by Chad Denton

When the TARDIS next lands, the Doctor mistakenly asks for Susan to open the doors, causing Barbara and Ian to feel sorry for him. Outside the Doctor recognizes their surroundings as the planet Dido, which he had visited once before. While the Doctor stays behind, Ian and Barbara move on, coming across a city that appears to be in ruins. Before they can investigate further, they come across a being called the Koquillon, who traps Ian, the Doctor, and the TARDIS by using some sort of weapon to create an explosion and then shoves Barbara off a cliff. The Doctor identifies the Koquillons as the natives of the planet, but is confused at the hostile reception Ian and Barbara received since the Koquillons have a very hospitable and peaceful culture. Meanwhile Barbara is rescued by Vicki, whose ship crashed on Dido months ago. The only other survivor besides Vicki is a man named Bennett, whose injuries keep him bedridden. Vicki explains that it’s the 25th century and that the same Koquillon Barbara encountered has been keeping them prisoner, threatening that if they stray far from the ship the other Koquillons will kill them, just like they, according to Bennett, killed the other crew members. Their only hope is a rescue ship that is supposed to arrive soon. Vicki’s father, who was moving with Vicki to another world after the death of Vicki’s mother, was among those who died. Continue reading Trash Culture’s Dr. Who Reviews – The Rescue (1965) →

Movies, Reviews

Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)

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Was a time, in the mid-90s, when I never thought I'd see this image in anything other than trade paperback collections. Progress?
Was a time, in the mid-90s, when I never thought I’d see this image in anything other than trade paperback collections.

Robin, the Boy Wonder, is one of the most controversial characters in superhero comics. First debuting in 1940 as a transparent attempt to (what else?) attract new readers, he immediately became a popular and enduring staple of the Batman mythos despite inspiring decade’s worth of Gay Panic, humorous or otherwise. The general populous conceives Robin as an eternal twelve year-old, jumping around rooftops when he should be doing his homework. But who can concentrate on algebra when Killer Croc’s out killing mobsters in a bid to take over Gotham City’s underworld? What kid wouldn’t want to live over the Batcave?

Thankfully, comic book Robin’s been allowed to grow up. By the late 70s, his civilian identity, Dick Grayson, had graduated high school and moved off to college. As Robin, he’d assumed command of the Justice League’s youth brigade, the Teen Titans, and helped save the world on numerous occasions. By 1983, he’d all but disappeared from Gotham, necessitating a new youngster fill his little green boots.

Enter Jason “Oh my God” Todd. As in “Oh my God, Bruce, I can not believe you took this kid under your wing.” First conceived as a transparent replacement for Dick Grayson (how transparent? Well, Jason was also a second generation circus acrobat whose parents also happened to catch their death from Crime), Jason suffered a lot in the great continuity rewrite of 1986, Crisis on Infinite Earths. When the multiverse finally stabilized, Jason was reborn as a street urchin, orphaned by Crime and taken in by Batman after Bruce caught him trying to steal tires…off the Batmobile…yeah… Continue reading Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010) →

Reviews, Television

Trash Culture’s Ninja Turtles Rip-offs, Case Study #3: Battletoads

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by Chad Denton

Technically Battletoads counts as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knock-off, but still it’s one that managed to become something entirely in its own right. Battletoads is rightly remembered as one of the best games in the history of the Nintendo Entertainment System, a game that starts off as a slightly off-kilter beat-’em up but then goes through an amazing array of stages and challenges that made it feel like at least several different good (if hard as hell) games in one. It says a lot about the quality and creativity of the game that it’s considered a classic in spite of the fact that it’s so frustrating it tests the limits of human reaction times, as anyone who survived the obstacle course race levels can tell you.

Continue reading Trash Culture’s Ninja Turtles Rip-offs, Case Study #3: Battletoads →

Movies, Reviews

All-Star Superman (2011)

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Covershot!
Covershot!

Every once in a not-so-great while, comic book companies decide to annihilate decades of established continuity and set their famous characters back to Year Zero in the name of attracting new readers. Such publicity stunts will inevitably antagonize existing fans whose bad word of mouth will (theoretically) scare away those coveted new readers. So it was that, sometime around 1998, Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison teamed up with other Big Name writers Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer to pitch a complete revamp of Superman.

“We believe that the four of us understand the new face of Superman: a forward-looking, intelligent, enthusiastic hero retooled to address the challenges of the next thousand years.  The ultimate American icon revitalized for the new millennium as an aspirational figure, a role model for 21st Century global humanity.

“The Superman relaunch we’re selling bucks the trend of sweeping aside the work done by those who came immediately before.  Unlike the ‘cosmic reset’ revamps all too prevalent in current comics, our New Superman approach is an honest attempt to synthesize the best of all previous eras.  Our intention is to honor each of Superman’s various interpretations and to use internal story logic as our launching pad for a re-imagined, streamlined 21st century Man of Steel.” Continue reading All-Star Superman (2011) →

Movies, Reviews

The Thing from Another World (1951)

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"Damnit! I told you: this is the Boys Club! No girls, godless commies or blood-sucking aliens allowed!"
“Damnit! I told you: this is the Boys Club! No girls, godless commies or blood-sucking aliens allowed….! Well, okay; maybe one girl’s allowed, but she’s hot!”

In 1951, science fiction movies took two booster shots to the arm and entered into the public consciousness on a scale so grand that, looking back on it now, it’s like watching a dam burst in slow motion. So much so that one can easily drown in the torrent of “creature features” America produced in the 1950s. All thanks to two films that defined the boundaries of their sub-genre, enlivening hoary old tropes by dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century.

One of those films, which we’ll consider in its own time, was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The other, released five months before, was The Thing from Another World. You can try and find a stranger pair of siblings…but I don’t really want you too. These two are all I need because they were all the genre needed at the time.

Prior to their release, science fiction was a joke, laughed at and bemoaned in turn by polite society, allowing it to become the sole province of nerds. The Thing irrevocably welded Sci-fi to Horror and saved both genres from their separate decline into self-parody and stupidity…as evidenced by another “great” film from 1951, Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. The world was six years away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the old monsters had lost their grip on the collective amygdilla. New monsters – in a comfortably Frankenstein-ish mode, to be sure, but still – were already moving back in the shadows, ready to pop through the first conveniently open door and take your head off with a casual swipe. Continue reading The Thing from Another World (1951) →

Movies, Reviews

Zombie vs. Ninja (1988)

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Hmmm...The Kung Fu Fighting Dead...now *there's* a show I'd actually watch.
Hmmm...The Kung Fu Fighting Dead...now *there's* a show I'd actually watch.

Sorry it’s taken me this long to talk about Godfrey Ho, but the task is somewhat daunting. Man’s got twenty-five years worth of movies on his resume, with over a hundred credited titles to chose from. Some are almost decent. Some are so bad they’ve redefined “bad Hong Kong action movie” for an entire generation. And some are so weird you’ll wonder if you ever saw them in the first place. One of those is Zombie vs. Ninja.

There are cheap bastards and then there are cheap bastards, but even the cheapest, most miserly Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ notebook would stand in awe of Godfrey Ho’s filmmaking techniques. Ho liked to take the money most people would use to shoot a movie, shoot half of a movie, and then splice that half together with incomplete films he found moldering in Hong Kong studio basements. Or foreign films bought up cheap from Thailand, the Philippines, or South Korea. This ensured Ho could make two, three, sometimes even four films for the price of one. He made no promises about their overall quality. And neither do I. Continue reading Zombie vs. Ninja (1988) →

Reviews, Television

Trash Culture’s Dr. Who Reviews – Planet of the Giants (1964)

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by Chad Denton

Well, we’ve made it to the second season, so let’s get started with a serial whose premise also became a level in “Super Mario Bros. 3?…

As the TARDIS lands in what the Doctor assures Barbara and Ian is their native time, something malfunctions and the Doctor panics. When they try to view what’s outside, the scanner breaks. Outside they’re puzzled by what seems to be a stone monument shaped like a massive pebble. Splitting up to investigate further, Susan and Ian find a dead ant the size of a cat while the Doctor and Barbara find a gigantic earthworm that’s also dead. Soon Ian and Susan also find a large box of stock (that is, the broth kind, not the finance kind) that was manufactured in Norwich. Simultaneously the Doctor and Susan realize that the TARDIS and they as well have become smaller than an inch. Continue reading Trash Culture’s Dr. Who Reviews – Planet of the Giants (1964) →

Movies, Reviews

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

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Bad news is, you're the best character in this film because you're not in it long enough for me to get bored with you.
Bad news is, Andy, you’re the best character in the film. Because you don’t have any lines. The less people speak in this movie, the fewer chances they have to piss me off.

The original Dawn of the Dead was twenty-six years old by the time this remake entered the pipeline. Its time had very much come and, in one sense, already gone. Tom Savini’s 1990 Night of the Living Dead remake celebrated its sweet sixteen by the time 28 Days Later broke out of its “low” budget genre ghetto, made it to Sundance, eventually broke out of that ghetto, too, and became a critical darling and smash hit…for whatever reason.

I try to ignore Spring horror films as much as I can because they tend to suck as a rule. (A popular example from the year in which I write – 2011 – would be the Scott Charles Stewart directed Paul Bettany vehicle, Priest.) January and February are studio dumping grounds for sub-standard, shitty movies they know no one will want to see. By March they’ve usually worked through the previous year’s back catalog and begun to ship out films designed specifically for home  markets. Christ’s sake, no one really wants to watch big budget horror movies in March…but March is only seven months away from Halloween. Time enough for a film (like this one, which “only” cost $28 million) to earn its money back in theaters, allowing ancillary sales (like seasonally-appropriate DVDs and TV broadcast rights) to count as pure profit.

Predictably, this movie became the early breakout hit of 2004. Not that anyone at Universal actually predicted that. They were convinced the complete failure of 2003’s House of the Dead meant no one really wanted to see any more zombie movies. (And as long as by “no one” they meant “me” that statement held true.) Anyone with a functional brain could’ve told them House of the Dead failed because of two key words: “Uwe” and “Boll.” Never the less, Universal cut every corner they could, going so far as to turn the cameras over to some jumped up car commercial director named Zack Snyder. Continue reading Dawn of the Dead (2004) →