Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
Wicked Wicked
From film diary
Challenge your imagination? That might be a little optimistic…
This is quite a weird one. As you can see from any of the pictures, Wicked Wicked is a film based entirely around the gimmick of duo-vision. Yep, that’s two screens at once. Mostly they’re different angles of the same scene but sometimes they show wildly different things: a character pauses for thought whilst a flashback plays out on the the other side.
Glastonbury
From film diary
Glastonbury was filmed by Julien Temple and aims to tell the story of the festival and show some of the highlights from down the years in a way that is very much in homage to / blatantly ripping off the Woodstock film.
Temple had access to a much greater range of footage than Michael Wadleigh did when making Woodstock though and so he attempts to get a hand around roughly 35 years of the Glastonbury festival, from its creation as the Glastonbury fayre, through the Pyramid festival, right up to the Glastonbury festival of Contemporary Performing Arts that it is today. In this manner it sort of meanders through the decades in a haphazard fashion. We get grainy footage of hippies from the 70s, apparently dancing to the Scissor Sisters, cut amongst festival-goers of the 21st century.
xXx
Tonight I watched this. Predictably, it was mostly rubbish.
(Though we did rather like the line: “I’ll say this once: Don’t shit on my lawn”)
Mini Moni the Movie: the Great Cake Adventure
This is, without doubt, one of the strangest things I have ever seen. Too weird for IMDb to even list it, Mini Moni the Movie: the Great Cake Adventure is just too damn odd to be true.
From film diary
It clocks in at a little less than an hour and is mostly animation with some live scenes. So far, so good. It’s entirely set in a café that serves the most fantastic cakes and, er… as you might (or might not) expect, this involves a rogue, body-image obsessed queen who hates cakes, fairie minions who turn the cakes into stone, a talking fridge, legions of asexually reproducing gingerbread men….
Tokyo Gore Police
From director Yoshihiro Nishimura comes a completely bonkers but very fun tale of genetic mutation, police brutality and (of course) heaps of bloodshed. The story is entirely silly and the characters aren’t exactly deep and well-crafted but… does that really matter?
This is a film which very much does what it sets out to do. We get dismembered torsos, severed limbs, crazy animal-claw mutations and a heap of body parts just begging for someone to ram at high speed with a police car. So what does Ruka do? Why, she rams them of course, sending arms, legs and other body bits scattering across the roads of Japan.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
“I’m just out for a good time. The rest is propaganda”
This one’s a classic. Re-watched it yesterday and can strongly recommend it to anyone. A film of life in 1960s industrial Nottingham, lead character Arthur is a hard-working factory labourer, tied to his lathe all week and heading to the pubs for boozing and womanising at the weekends. The story’s fun, but this is mostly a fab picture of how life was ‘back in the day’.
No Man's Land: Rise of the Reeker
Stumbled across this fairly lame action/horror attempt on zone horror. Starts as a fairly tame sherriff vs. robbers film, turns into a fairly tame sherriff and robbers vs. monster film and then descends into a confusing ‘what-the-hell-just-happened?’ film. So not great then.
The only part that is truly wonderful is the sequence where the characters discover the invisible wall (yes, seriously…) that’s trapping them in this haunted little bit of desert. One guy plays out the full Parisian Street-mime repetoir, feeling the invisible wall, leaning on it, pressing his face against it and finally running headlong into it.