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.
The sad thing is that the gimmick actually works pretty well and is dragged down by a god-awful plot. In some moments, with the killer hiding on one screen and the others looking for him on the other screen, the two screens device really does actually add a bit of tension.
Kinves!
They can talk on the phone between screens
Sadly, the story is rubbish, the acting pretty laughable and the pacing even worse. It’s only 90ish minutes long; it really shouldn’t drag like it does.
That said, the first 20 minutes or so are pretty good and the last 20 are really good fun. It’s just the middle 50 that crawl past… It suffers from being one of those slasher flicks with very little slashing.
Although the killer has a bit of a thing for stabbing blondes, and mostly just after they’ve come from the shower, the film isn’t sexy in the slightest. This doesn’t stop it producing what is possibly an all time classic line though: the secretary lady, who is having a bit of a fling with the doctor/dentist/security man slyly says:
“I think I feel another toothache coming on, Doctor…”
“Sorry love, I’m not drilling today”
(Well it made me laugh anyway…)
Mostly crap. Fun at the end.
How moody…
Fake blood to the face!
Fairly impressively the trailer below, though it makes a fuss at the start about “Duo-Vision” doesn’t actually show any of the parallel screens. How odd…
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.
Mr Eavis thinking of all that cash…
It does attempt to tell the story of the festival. A bit. Michael Eavis funded the film but, having given Temple a free hand to make it as he saw fit, it doesn’t go over the top in painting him as the hero of the piece. In fact, he’s shown being a pretty miserable bastard to a bunch of travellers who wanted £10 each for their contribution to the entertainment. He also does admit to a news reporter that it’s primarily about the money….
Some of the performances are fantastic, though are - for obvious reasons - weighted towards the more recent years. There’s Bjork, Bowie, Pulp, Massive Attack and loads more. Sadly, other’s are less great: The Bravery surely only got into the film thanks to the bassist playing naked….
As such, the film really has no idea whether it’s concert footage or a documentary. We get a vaguely chronological story, broken up by decidedly non-chronological songs. It all feels a little muddled at times.
Nick Cave
The redeeming feature is definitely the footage of interviews with the locals of Glastonbury during the early years. We get the grumpy man who responds the the question “will you be going to the festival?” with the fantastic “Yeah…. with a tommy gun”, but the clincher is surely the friendly local who struggles with the hippies’ anti-social smell:
“It’s not just a matter of body odour, for some of these people it’s really evil smelling. Someone has to make a stand against there very dirty, very unwashed people.”
Overall then, watch it if you’ve been to Glastonbury, watch it if you’re going to go to Glastonbury, watch it if you’d like to go to Glastonbury and watch it whilst crying into a pint of cider if you try and fail to get tickets to go to Glastonbury.
But if you’re not particularly interested in Glastonbury, don’t watch it expecting a riveting story…
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….
I knew Japanese films had a tendency towards the weird but this is something entirely unexpected!
Please watch this if ever you get the chance!
The trailer I found is sadly unsubtitled but is stil worth a watch, if only to get a sense of how truly mad this really is:
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.
For a film that starts out with chainsaw wielding hand-to-hand combat, it makes its intentions clear from the off and doesn’t get a lot more sensible. It’s decidedly too long however, and at a fraction under 2 hours you can be forgiven for having got a little tired of the ultra-violence. There’s only so many people you can see being beheaded before it begins to get a little repetitive.
Still, that’s hardly a major complaint. What you get here is probably pretty unlike most things you might have seen and definitely won’t be forgotten in a hurry. Definitely worth a watch…
(…and I haven’t even mentioned the girl with the crocodile-jaw legs…)
Trailer:
And it pretty much goes without saying, but watch the subtitled version, not the dub, yeh?