Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action
Director: Yu Chik-Lim
Year: 1996

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TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
The Plot isn’t exactly a great movie — it has a lot of problems.
The filmmaking by director Yu Chik-Lim is very sloppy. Some of the action is so undercranked that it’s laughable. I was thinking of one shot of a jeep arriving in the nick […]

Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: John Dahl
Year: 1993

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TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Watching Red Rock West again, I’m struck by how elegantly director John Dahl establishes the mood of the movie. An archetypal shot of straight road vanishing into the mountains beyond, with the big sky of Oklahoma above. A languid tracking shot into a dusty […]

Country: Japan
Genre: Action/ Swordplay/ Comedy/ Drama
Director: Kimiyoshi Yasuda
Year: 1971
Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Poor Jimmy Wang (Yu Wang), The One-Armed Swordsman, has come to Japan to escape his enemies in China and live in peace. He’s on his way to a Japanese monastery when he meets a family from China, making a living by giving martial […]

Country: United States
Genre: Blackploitation
Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Year: 1971

Rating:

CLASSICS I HATE
It’s too bad in a way — Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song could have been a powerful motion picture. As it stands, it’s an interesting social document.
In the prologue, we find out that our hero Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) was snatched off the streets as a […]

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action
Director: Danny Go
Year: 1996

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
At first, Bloody Friday seems like it’s only going to be passably entertaining.
It seems like there’s a helmeted motorcyclist running around killing prostitutes. This yo-yo doesn’t kill them any old way, either. The motorcyclist makes a point of doing crazy stunts, flying through the […]

Country: United States
Genre: Horror/Suspense/Satire/Drama
Director: Stuart Gordon
Year: 2007

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
In 2003, nurse’s aid Chante Jawan Mallard plowed into a homeless man with her car after a night of partying, drove home with the man wedged into her broken windshield, and left him to die in her garage.
I remember reading the news accounts of the […]

Country: Japan
Genre: Action/ Swordplay/ Comedy/ Drama
Director: Shintarô Katsu
Year: 1972
Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Zatoichi In Desperation, a late entry in the long-running Zatoichi series about a blind masseur and swordsman, is an unusually thoughtful tale, even by the standards of early 70s Japanese samurai flicks.
Zatoichi (Shintarô Katsu) inadvertently contributes to the death of an old woman […]

Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Taylor Hackford
Year: 1984

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
It’s instructive to remember that when Against All Odds came out in 1984, it got only one Academy Award nomination, for best song of all things. This is in spite of an airtight screenplay, fantastic character turns from James Woods, Jane Greer, Richard Widmark, […]

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Drama/Action
Director: Ringo Lam
Year: 1988

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Director Ringo Lam’s 1988 film, School On Fire, is famously the bleakest of all of his films, and this from a director whose nickname was the “Dark-Faced God.” The Hong Kong censors, no doubt appalled by Lam’s apocalyptic vision, chopped the living crap out […]

Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Richard Fleischer
Year: 1974

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
I first saw Mr. Majestyk on TV several years after it’s theatrical run. It struck me then as a thoroughly modest, even bland entertainment. How time changes things. Now, I’m fairly impressed.
Mr. Majestyk is a watermelon farmer who wants to get his crop in. […]