You Must See This Movie

All posts in this blog are intended to highlight movies (either really good or really bad) that run the risk of being overlooked by the public. Great movies that are well known to the general public need not apply. The following movie is in the Good category: Defendor stars Woody Harrelson as Arthur Poppington, a man with a developmental disability who puts on a makeshift costume and fights crime as Defendor while seeking out Captain Industry, whom he believes killed his parents. Along the way he meets and befriends a street worker, Kat Debrofkowitz (Kat Dennings). This movie, by first time director Peter Stebbings could have gone horribly wrong. When your lead character has a developmental disability, the acting needs to be a bit restrained, and Harrelson has been known to overact at times. Thankfully here he hits the right note. Arthur is sympathetic but believable, neither a caricature nor some idealized person with a disability; he’s no Forrest Gump spouting words o...

All posts in this blog are intended to highlight movies (either really good or really bad) that run the risk of being overlooked by the public. Great movies that are well known to the general public need not apply. The following movie is in the Bad category: Alley Cat follows a martial artist named Billie (Karin Mani) who takes on a street gang. This street gang has the worst luck, only encountering Billie or her grandparents whenever they attempt a mugging. All this turns Billie into a vigilante. Before her final showdown Billie ends up teaming with a cop named Johnny (Robert Tortl) and runs afoul of a Judge Taylor (Jay Walker, yes, Jay Walker) who seems to have written his own courtroom rules that you won’t find anywhere else. Night and day in the movie seems to follow shooting schedules and not any real world sense of time. One can easily believe that Johnny is an undercover cop: he is so laid back that absolutely nothing about him even remotely hints of cop; the onl...

All posts in this blog are intended to highlight movies (either really good or really bad) that run the risk of being overlooked by the public. Great movies that are well known to the general public need not apply. The following movie is in the Good category: The Norwegian movie Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead, original name Død snø 2 (2014) follows a survivor from the first movie (whom I won’t identify so as not to reveal which of the students live or die in the first one), as he pursues the Nazi zombies, still led by Herzog (again played by Ørjan Gamst) as they now try to raid a Russian village. He now has the ability to create zombies of his own and he is aided by three geekie American youth who call themselves the Zombie Squad. Dead Snow 2 is one of those rare movies where the sequel is even better than the original. The humour is even more twisted, even more a sense of nothing being sacred. One zombie who acts as the main sidekick to the group of zombie fighters has a swe...

Dead Snow / Død snø (2009): You Must See This Movie All posts in this blog are intended to highlight movies (either really good or really bad) that run the risk of being overlooked by the public. Great movies that are well known to the general public need not apply. The following movie is in the Good category: The Norwegian movie Dead Snow, original name Død snø (2009) is a zombie movie, this time set in a snow covered resort. A group of medical students on a ski vacation discover Nazi loot, which causes Nazi zombies led by Oberst Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) to come after them and kill them for the treasure. The movie has a nice sense of humour to it, including a couple characters hanging from a cliff by something that isn’t rope, and a crow giving away a student’s location. Plenty of humorous gore. Herzog is most likely named after influential German director Werner Herzog and is a memorable villain, uttering commands in a zombie language. One suggestion that a character ...