Here’s a trailer for the forthcoming film Big Ass Spider:
It’s every bit as good as you would expect a trailer for a film called Big Ass Spider to be.
I’m pretty sure the intro at the beginning of the clip was timed just right to make the bikini volleyball scene show up as the default YouTube image…
I don’t know much about Skywave beyond what’s on their MySpace page, which mentioned they’re from Fredericksburg, Virginia. With that deeply uninformative introduction out of the way, here’s the deeply reverb-drenched “Nothing Left to Say” off their album Synthstatic.
Here’s Echodrone’s cover of The Alan Parsons’ Project’s “Time” from their Mixtape for Duckie covers album. The video has less than a hundred views as I type this, so I’m happy to showcase something that actually qualifies as new! Most cover albums do nothing for me, even by artists I really like (see also: Scratch My Back and Strange Little Girls), but everything I’ve heard from this I liked so much, I just went ahead and bought it
See how long it takes you to figure out what the video is about, something I twigged to very early, and which ties into themes explored in their previous videos.
A Swedish shoegazer cover of a Captain Beefheart sing? Check.
In his tomb in upthrust Lapland
Dead Kris Kringle lies dreaming
If you’re looking for a weird Christmas horror movie, you could do a lot worse than the Finnish movie Rare Exports. The son of a reindeer herder/butcher finds out that a team just over the border in Russia are drilling into a mountain they believe to be a tomb.
It quickly becomes apparent that the tomb is that of Santa Claus. And the real Santa Claus is not the jolly fellow of Coke commercials, but a fearsome punisher of the wicked that looks a lot more like Krampus:
What makes the film work is its cold, gritty, unsentimental realism. It really does look like it was filmed in a tiny village in Ass End of Nowhere, Finland. Save an unconvincing CGI helicopter at the end, and the strange coda that gives the film its name, I thought everything about the movie worked pretty well. Of recent Scandinavian horror films, I thought this worked better than Dead Snow, but not as good as Let the Right One In.
Worth viewing, and available on Netflix.
I was going to do a longer review, but I’m running out of Christmas.
Here’s “Beneath,” a nice, melodic song from classic shoegazers Ride:
Busy week. Here’s more Echodrone, this time with “Cold Snap,” which is pleasantly haunting.
Their Bon Voyage is starting to sound like a good candidate for Shoegazer album of the year. Any others you can suggest?
The first trailer for Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s kaiju vs. giant mechs film, is out.
Oh yeah. I’m there.
Howard Waldrop and I have signed up to review this next year.
You know, just in case you were considering doing that.
While there’s no end to fail video on the Internet, I’m posting this one because: A.) It was such an obviously, amazingly stupid thing to attempt in the first place, and B.) I tried to find this a while back to show friends, but had forgotten the actual conveyance (bike? skateboard?), which made finding the video difficult. So this is more of a bookmark for myself than anything else. As well as an abject lesson in what not to do.
Vampire Effect
Directed by Dante Lam and Donnie Yen
Written by Hing-Ka Chan and Wai Lun Ng
Starring Ekin Cheng, Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Edison Chen, Jackie Chan, Mickey Hardt
If you like Hong Kong supernatural martial arts films, you’ll probably enjoy Vampire Effect (AKA Twins Effect, since the two female leads are evidently in the same pop band). Modern-day vampire hunter gets cute new partner who clashes with his cute sister, who just happens to be dating an Emo vampire prince whose essence a vampire king wants to eat to unlock a vampire grimoire. Martial arts ensue.
You know, the usual.
Jackie Chan has an extended supporting role that’s pretty much unnecessary, except you get to see Jackie Chan fight vampires. He’s third-billed and gets about 15 minutes of screen time, so it doesn’t even make Top Ten Most Dishonest Uses of Jackie Chan’s Name on the DVD Cover list. (I’m looking at you, Drunken Fist Boxing.)
This hasn’t gotten great reviews, and it’s not a patch on the best work in the genre by the late, great Ching-Ying Lam. The romance subplot drags a bit. The pace and style of the film does rip off the Blade movies…which in turn were ripping off Hong Kong action films, which ripped off everything they could lay their hands on, so par for the course. But it’s funny, and the action scenes work, which is pretty much all I ask as a threshold for enjoyment for this kind of film.
The “sequel” Twins Effect II is evidently a historical martial arts epic with much of the same cast, but none of the same characters.
Supposedly the American DVD (I saw it on-demand) has some scenes chopped that hinder the continuity. When it comes to Hong Kong action films, continuity does not rank high on my list of requirements. I saw the version with lots of martial arts.