Truck Stop DVD - "Countdown" Good, but Not the "Sudden Death" Remake We Were Hoping for.

Dolph Ziggler the Movie: Good, but Not Title or 3,000 Screen Ready

Finally, my wrestling-themed Tublr (Rip 'Em System) can promote my movie rantings. If only I could have debuted my Danny Glover, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hanna, and Michael Madsen masochistic experience by comparing that Stephen Baldwin to the bloodless era of WWE. A missed metaphor?

After the failure that was "No Holds Barred", WWE has yet to make movies to truly promote their primary product. It anything, these films are just opportunities for Vince McMahon to display what would be too much for even the Attitude Era: The horror franchises that fit Kane's gimmick; Rape being the ultimate heel move; Gimmick matches based around murder.

"Countdown" promoted itself as the first film to include the product. It was supposed to be "Sudden Death" at a house show. Since that feature was one of my favorite Jean-Claude Van Dam flicks, Dolph Ziggler's first starring vehicle's premise had potential.

Ray Fitzpatrick (Ziggler) is a burned out cop with nothing to lose, and that gets results. Unfortunately for him, internal affairs frowns upon shooting your partner like Sterling Archer would shoot Cyril to avoid blowing your cover, regardless of how many Russians you irritate to preserve the American way of life. Concerned for his pension, Lt. Cronin (Glenn "Kane" Jacobs) places the super cop on paid suspension with hopes that the critics will forget about his antics.

It is not his critics that the Seattle Police Department should be worrying about. The next day, a Russian obsessed with Ray's exploits sends them a video of a child who is strapped with enough explosives to obliterate a 40-yard radius. If Ray does not deliver $2,000,112.35 to the bomber at the WWE show, he will make a phone call to vaporize the youngster and any neighbors.

Like one of every three WWE angles, the exchange does not work out. Ray is able to kill his foil before he can set off the bomb, but that leaves us with no one who knows where the kids is. With the suspension leaving our hero with no regulations, he is going to harass every criminal west of the Urals until he saves the day while IA member Julia Baker (Katharine Isabelle) will try to piece the chaos together and keep Cronin off his tail.

"Countdown" decides to be clever instead of obvious and ridiculous, and it works. This is good because the direction is not there.

The first act was put in the can very quickly and the false and actual finales are chock full of continuity flaws. Michael Finch and Richard Wenk's script is a fool proof 80's film and Dolph Ziggler is not expected to emote anything but Mel Gibson's hippest, pro semetic attitude.

The script goes to some odd places, but with every ridiculous hunch Ziggler's character has, Isabelle's role is there to make sure the cynics will suspend their disbelief. Eventually, your only complaint is that they only cast two WWE talents to act. And they still find a way to emasculate Rusev.

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Alexander Kalugin is a great Willem Dafoe knock off, but the rest of the thugs should have been "superstars". If you watch Southpaw Regional Wrestling, you know all of the Smackdown roster attempting Russian accents would make this a VOD rental/purchase instead of waiting for it to be streaming for free.

If you need a WWE fix while you are waiting for the WWE Network to give you a promo to return, first watch "AEW Dark" and "NWA Powerrr". If that is not enough, then "Countdown" is your methadone. Like any illicit drug, you can find this movie at truck stops, in the DVD bin with at least two other good WWE Studios flicks packaged with it. (I have yet to watch "The Condemned 2" so perhaps four.)

"Countdown" is silly like the current product and clever like ECW. The only thing it lacks is the nudity and graphic violence to be an ideal 80's action flick. Most importantly, this is the best of use of Dolph Ziggler since April of 2013. This feature is a product for the smarks who need to see this guy fully utilized.

I think Dolph is overrated as a wrestler, so please see this film to put Ziggler's career in an ideal direction. Or petition WWE to create a TV Championship if we must compromise. Just cheer for him cashing checks instead of hoping he wins world titles.

Flight of the Living Dead - It's Only 90 minutes

Zombie movie intrigue is not based on gore, whether they are runners or walkers, or video quality. It is usually dependent on a great gimmick, and the easiest gimmick is the location/setting.

It is kind of like "Die Hard" sequels. Strand the heroes in confined spaces or simply offer them no exits. As long as there are a lot of enemies, how can you mess that up...the intrigue at least? (Since writing the first draft of this review, I have seen the fourth and fifth "Return of the Living Dead" films, so it is not as hard as I thought in 2009). This works for all of George Romero's zombie features. If "Flight of the Living Dead" (aka "Plane Dead") only had Bruce Willis, all genres would come around full circle.

During a storm on an transatlantic flight, a mysterious cargo is disturbed. As the doctors who are responsible for the contents and the crew investigate why the plane's communications have gone down, they are caught off guard by the undead running amok. Now it is up to a FBI agent, a TSA agent, and a black pro golfer to regain control of the craft before the USAF shoot them down to contain the threat.

When "Flight of the Living Dead" begins, it has a lot of potential. Sure the exterior shots are totally CG, but it is loaded with many of the most underappreciated character actors ever. Enough of these actors are featured that it should be part of Universal's "Dark Universe" (if that is still a thing). Kevin J. O'Connor and Erick Avari from 1999's "The Mummy" and Raymond J Barry from "Rapid Fire" and "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" all have significant roles. Unfortunately, they must have spent the entire budget on names that will not bring the common man into the theater.

The story starts out great. It may seem a little slow, but that is so they can thoroughly set the continuity for the film through out. It does a good job to maintain this, but when the outbreak occurs, you realize that they did not set ground rules for how to handle these zombies.

This is not the rage virus, so shooting them in the ball and chest is just done for kicks. And since they are zombies, Tiger Wood's driver to the skull is a kill. Unless they want to associate themselves with the lesser "Return of the Living Dead" series, just playing "Double Dragon" through the undead is boring. Especially when there are no squibs to be seen. The gore is too heavily dependent of computer generated effects.

Every direct-to-video zombie flick has better gore. There are a few scenes of tearing flesh with teeth, but most of the time they pan away when a crucial infectious bite occurs. If you are doing an unrated zombie movie, we need a gut buster or ridiculous head being split in half. The best we get is a nun losing her shins.

This film is like walking though a Halloween pop-up retailer. The "Flight of the Living Dead" mayhem is only good for photos in "Fangoria". Its script ignores the fact that it has too good a cast and archetypes to fill it with CG-heavy violence. Leaving this movie feely queasy would only occur as the result of consuming bad popcorn.

IMDb.com - Flight of the Living Dead (2007)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780583

90 min Red Box: "Snatchers" Diablo Cody with a "Gremlins" Twist

*Blog entry started on March 16, 2020.

And now the virus has left us without any opportunities for fun. That is a bit of hyperbole of course. With 14 video game libraries, two streaming devises, a region-free DVD player, a UHD Blu-ray player, and a VCR, there are plenty of means to have fun in my living room.

Provided you can deal with the company of a hard-to-read former better quarter. (Eva the Cat will always get half). Ironically, I think I have become the cat in the relationship. She just loves having living things around her. If they do not come up to her for pets and snuggling, their activities do not matter to her. Perhaps I should find a dead mouse to tell her to get involved with the environment. At least that will provide me with a chance to get in trouble, if only for a few minutes.

What I cannot do go out and is get into trouble. If you cannot do that on Saint Patrick's Day, when can you? Are the Irish-Americans (my lesser quarter) going to get an unofficial? Maybe I should start printing up some green racist shirts.

My current job and my access to it would make it the ideal speakeasy. It is the Roaring 20's after all. Call in some of my friends in the performance industry from Peoria, and there would be some money to be made. The parking is off the street, so no reason for suspicion. And we do have a guy with access to kegs and other booze. If it was not for old people being the primary people coming into the establishment, there would be zero risk of viral concerns. But the lobby is closed.

Alas, everyone at the day job (fortunately) still has a day job, so no one is taking the idea seriously. I should be use to I since I (we) have yet to get my (our) no/low-budget, feature-length, pro-wrestling zom-com "Main Event of the Dead" out of development hell (If you have any suggestions on how to get this production going or need a proof-of-concept/script treatment, email me at russthebus07@gmail.com). If only this nonsense did not sound so much like Will Ferrell's "The House".

Thank the gods the liquor stores are still open. That may be able to numb the loneliness further enhanced by my ex's nature. Then again, I might just go on a seeming endless YouTube dive as I wait for her to go to bed like she says she will. She was nearly asleep by the end of the "Westworld" season premiere, but the lights go on, and her crafting catalogues are then opened. If you are just bored, let me know. I want to get to bed at a decent hour, so I will be more than happy to move to another room to watch the pregnancy-horror comedy that I suspect you will lack the stomach for. Fifty five cents is all I want to give Red Box at a time.

Snatchers - Overly Clever Title and Story

Sara seems to have everything going for her way to start her junior year of high school. Being in the popular clique has secured that. It only cost her relationship with her mom and best friend Haley. The only thing that could make things better was if her ex-boyfriend Skyler would take her back, but since he returned from a trip to the Mayan settlements in Mexico, sex is the only thing on his mind. If she was willing to alienate those closest to her for status, why hold on to virginity?

Skyler is not exactly bright enough to be ready with protection, but if anything unplanned for occurred, Sara will have at least a couple months to deal with it. After morning sickness and mood swings the next day at school, she suspects something is wrong. 24 hours later, she is nine months pregnant. Being the daughter of a teen pregnancy, she cannot let her mom find out. Her boyfriend is a little too dim and way too horny to turn to. Her clique status will be lost if they find out. Only Haley has enough concern for her to be trusted with this problem.

This problem escalates when Sara gives such an explosive birth that it immediately kills the OBGYN who was prepped for the delivery. The two escape the monster at the free clinic, but it appears that there is another fetus in Sarah. Our protagonist cannot wait in the pelvic exam position by a blender all night to solve this dilemma, so they decide to seek out a veterinarian to help them out. But the little alien's ability to hijack human host bodies and Skyler prepping to attend the big welcome back house party. Can two teenage girls stop what they surmise to be the end times the Mayan's promised?

"Snatchers" is a fun take on eighties horror tropes that only suffers from the current social restrictions on horror. These prevent the feature from being the chaotic and unapologetic comedy that its inspirations were allowed to be. I mean, why can we not hilariously kill douchebag popular kids like we use to?

The structure of the story requires too many acts. Once the creature is presented, we should focus on the hilarious means of battling it and have a more immediate method to multiply it. In the end, the film barely qualifies for pluralization in the title. Act two's first half is fun as the girls work on preventing the spread of the monsters, but the chaos from the second inciting incident is lost. If you were going to focus so much on the science of the fiction, perhaps introducing immediate horror is ill advised.

Focusing on the dealing with the unplanned pregnancy makes for an entirely different movie. The dialogue and performances are solid, but once we get the monster, we want to see the monster. So until we get to the climax after the creatures are reintroduced, the picture drags. There has to be a way to have both a tale of a strained sisterhood and a monster movie with strong special and gore effects at the same time. With "Snatchers" implying there will be a sequel, I hope there is a chance that we will get to see it.

"Snatchers" is only a few tweaks away from being a classic horror comedy, so watching the second act will be a bit frustrating. When the feature commits to laughs and gores, it makes the annoyances worth it. Olde Money Boyz (Directors/writers Stephen Cedars, Benji Kleiman and writer Scott Yacyshin) prove they are up-and-coming auteurs in the genre and it will be fun to see what they come up with next. Lets just hope they take the critiques from their 100% on the Tomatometer seriously.

IMDb: Snatchers (2019)

90 min HBO Max: "Lost Boys: The Tribe" and The Lazy

What will I be doing with my downtime since this blog will finish the "Chinese 211: Satire/Movie Reviews" journal? I am fairly confident that Chinese 210 may also have a notebook with many Western ramblings, but that would just be the depressed rants of 28-year old me. It maybe interesting to explore the brink of my last relationship, but again, depressing. After transcribing the review for "Lost Boys: The Tribe", that may have been enough torture for me.

This blog is going to inspire enough extra work. I loved the second and final made-for-video sequel of the classic adventure/horror film. Since there is proof of potential in term of "The Lost Boys" franchise, "The Thirst" must be reviewed.

I never thought I would go out of my way to rent a Corey Feldman title, but when you combine him with anything undead, something interesting should occur. Interesting defines "Bordello of Blood" (at least to the 16-year old Mortonite who still found Dennis Miller to be clever). Since I passed on watching Michael Jackson's funeral, it would not be fair if I passed up on "Lost Boys: The Tribe".

Chris and Nicole Emerson have just moved to California's latest missing persons capital. Who cares about suspected murders if the surf is good especially when it is a haven for the disenchanted heroes of the sport?

Surfing legend Shane Parker takes an interest in the Emerson siblings and will offer them anything to join his vampiric tribe. Nicole is quickly seduced, but luckily surfboard shaper and vampire hunter, the Reverend Edgar Frog is on the scene. Frog will be the perfect mentor to prepare Chris for war against the suck heads, if he can resist their overtures of course.

"Lost Boys 2" does whatever it can to avoid being as gay as its predecessor. An unfair approach to take since not all of Joel Schumacher's films are directly about sausage, but it allows the film to engage to the cult movie fan. Graphic violence (including Tom Savini's guts being busted), gratuitous nudity, and jokes about muscle-bound saxophonist are fun, but this film does not know whether it wants to be a reinvention, a sequel, or a parody.

Despite some great humor at points, a lot of the time the picture wants to either remind us how stupid the first film could be or rip off elements and characters from the classic. Because the only character from the predecessor is Feldman's, it is insulting to want us to feel like this is the same film by coming up with Diane Weist and Barnard Hughes (Lucy and Grandpa) knock offs. It is downright offensive because the landlady is doing an impersonation of an Oscar-winning actress.

It seems like the only thing LB2 wants the viewer to like about the first film is Edgar Frog (Feldman). If that is the case, it would have been a lot more fun if the entire movie was about him. With such lame villains, it would have be far more entertaining to see Feldman in the "Blade" role than a supporting one.

Vampires are suppose to be charismatic, but these surfers are just douchebags. Who would want to be friends with a guy who cannot determine who to channel from "Point Break", Brody or Utah?

These pathetic antagonists are not provided with a twist, so when they are defeated (spoiler), nothing is gained from it. Nothing worthwhile or clever happens, and that is essential to a vampire flick. Since the action in the film does not build to anything, when it stops, the viewer is not satisfied and no amount of gore or breasts will make up for that.

"Lost Boys: The Tribe" wastes all of the good ideas it has, and in an attempt to show that it is not a rip off, celebrates its bad ideas. If gore and nudity does not alienate some to "The Lost Boys" fans, the poor replacement characters will. Corey Feldman is the only reason to rent this disc, but that is for his featurette, not the movie itself.

Pinterest.com - Rodney Smit

https://www.pinterest.com/rodney1808

90 Min Netflix: "Yoga Hosers" Kevin Smith's Ode and Betrayal of Millenial Canucks

It seems that "Yoga Hosers" is widely considered to be the most pathetic directorial effort from the auteur, and being one of the biggest apologists for Smith, hearing that his flick about two Canadian clerks fighting off Nazi bratwursts sucked made me hesitate viewing it since the 2016 release. But I am a completist for better or for worst. (My restraint should be admired for the amount of times that I have typed worst without grabbing the pun.) Perhaps it is because I am apologist for the best screenwriter to not win an Oscar, that I was pleasantly surprised by this flick.

Or I was rewarded for being a completist in terms of collecting and viewing. Because I know what Smith finds funny, nothing awful came out of this feature. This film was to be expected at some point, and it is better to get it out of his system before he gets an AARP cover. Boomers will not stand for this kind of fun filmmaking.

Two years after Eh-2-Zed clerks Colleen C. and Colleen M. helped save the American podcaster who was transformed into a walrus, odd things are once again abound in Winnipeg. That figures since everyone seems to be against these Instagrammers. Their prep school P.E. teacher is fed up with the amount class time they spend on their phones. Yogi Bayer, their yoga teacher, is under constant threats from Warner Bros. over the name of his studio. And their 35-year drummer for their back of the store rock band, Glamthrax, still is not on the same page as his sophomore counter parts. But the biggest problem seems to be Tabitha, Colleen C's stepmom.

The two have just been invited to their first Grade 12 party, but because the Colleens keeps getting in the way of any chance she has to get intimate with her husband, as the convenient store manager, Tabitha is going to make them work that night as she whisks him off to Niagra Falls. In all actuality, the worst things for them is that the grade 12 party was being hosted by homicidal Satanists who are more than happy to bring the party to them. To make matters worst, these may not be the only killers out on a Friday night. It will take all their defensive Yoga skills to survive the night, but how will they explain the body count and sauerkraut that will be left in their wake?

"Yoga Hosers" biggest problem is that it does not know what it wants to be. I think it could have just been Canadian "Clerks" and work, but I am a customer service specialist. Just because I can deal with a new 90-minute set of irrelevance directed at idiots does not mean that the masses can. Hence you get a story about Generation Z versus Bratzis. The problem with that is not being able to see straight women doing that. If one of the C's was Belushi or Murray-esque, no question the film would be better.

So this movie is a concept that is unsellable, which is sad because there is plenty in it that is worth buying. Who would not be curious if the Canadian Nazi played by Haley Joe Osment was looking menacing over the convenience store from the heavens, complete with armband of course?

The movie works as a great B-movie, but when you get something from the director of "Chasing Amy" on a five-million dollar budget, you are expecting an indie film. This is definitely the wrong way to approach this feature because Kevin Smith has established who he is and what you should expect. "Yoga Hosers" seems to be the most fun on screen many of these actors have had. It may indicate that Smith is currently short on ideas, but by creating some new characters that he knows friends will comeback to, we may get a new Askewniverse.

This is definitely sounding like an apology to Smith for the backlash, so let me just list what is worthwhile about the flick. Nazi Osment; Yogi Justin Long; Work for stars who have taken a chance on this director; Johnny Depp collecting a check while having fun; An impressionist/mad scientist; Everyone you want to see lay down an overly thick Canadian accent, delivering on that accent.

The latter portion leaves me fearing what the Canucks will think of us. It is fun enough to pop in fun Canadian stereotype items (the "Good Old Hockey Game" cover during a Bratzi battle kept my interest), having Natasha Lyonne and Genesis Rodriguez be annoying with it may cause a culture war. Like "South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut" animosity.

If you want a great B-Movie, "Yoga Hosers" delivers. It leaves me thinking that I may have under complicated my zombie-wrestling comedy "Main Event of the Dead". (You be the judge by requesting a treatment via russthebus07@gmail.com.) Just know that you are seeing a B-Movie and appreciate that a director is allowed to make what he wants.

www.reeltalkinc.com/reel-review-yoga-hosers/

http://www.reeltalkinc.com/reel-review-yoga-hosers/