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DanXIII

1,300 stories

Movie Review: Heartland of Darkness (1992)

Newspaperman Paul Henson (Dino Tripodis) moves from the Windy City to the middle of nowhere (which is proven to be every bit as windy, and pretty damn rainy as well) and immediately gets up to his usual newspaper biz. As fate and the script would have it, Paul is up to his asshairs in stories to publish as the town is filled with all manner of dead bodies in various states of “completely fucked up”… and those cut-up corpses seem to be pointing to the involvement of the occult! Seeing as most of the town and people in positions of authority are under the sinister sway of Reverend Donovan (Nick Baldasare)… who looks like a man of the cloth by day and the goddamned Night Stalker once the sun has set, it comes as little surprise. Soon our hero, as well as his star journalist Shannon (Shanna Thomas) and the eccentric Reverend Kane (John Dunleavy), are at war with Satan’s

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DanXIII

Dec 17, 2022

MoviesReviews

Movie Review: Coraline (2009) and ParaNorman (2012) – Limited Edition Steelbook 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]

Our dear fiends over at Shout! Factory have unleashed a demonic duo of frightful family features, and I’m about to lay my eerie eyeballs on both monstrous movies! First up comes Coraline, an impressive stop-motion adaptation from Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) based on the yarn from Sandman’s Neil Gaiman! Coraline Jones has it rough; she’s the new kid in town, and her parents do nothing but work their asses off ‘round the clock. While existing in her solitude, our heroine makes the acquaintance of her parent’s landlady’s grandson; one, Wyborne “Wybie” Lovat (not to mention a black cat that always makes the scene), and before long her new pal hands Coraline a ragdoll his grandmother owns… and that thing looks just like our protagonist! Now get this, that doll is soon up and about, and leads Caroline to a secret door in the apartment that opens upon a parallel nightmare universe populated by button-eyed, saccharine doppelgangers of her

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DanXIII

Nov 30, 2022

MoviesReviewsSci-FiThriller

Movie Review – No Escape (1994)

In the fantastic future year of 2022, big biz owns the world’s prisons and they love nothing more than exiling problem prisoners to a remote island known as Absolom, a piece of land populated entirely by convicts, cannibals and other assorted wacky-ass chaps! This is something Marine John Robbins (Ray Liotta) learns about intimately as his ass is thrown there almost immediately after being incarcerated for the murder of the commanding officer who demanded our hero murder innocent civilians. Before long, Robbins finds himself caught between the neo-primitive Outsiders who rule the jungle with violence from a base located in an abandoned resort, and the Insiders, a group of more peaceful folk who form a small tribe that try to keep to themselves far removed from the Outsider’s jungle… though not so far that the gang’s leader, the absolutely off-the-wall Walter Marek (Stuart Wilson), doesn’t launch frequent pillaging sessions, much to the chagrin of the Insider’s leader, Father (the legendary

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DanXIII

Nov 22, 2022

MoviesReviewsSci-Fi

Movie Review: The Kindred (1987)

Ol’ scientist type John (David Allen Brooks) is having one hell of a shit day. Not only has his mother Amanda (Planet of the Apes‘ Kim Hunter), a scientist as well, been in the shittiest of health, but she is screaming all manner of shit about a brother John never knew he had (not before imploring him to destroy everything pertaining to her experiments). Speaking of “experiments”, the head of the lab where John toils away, Dr. Phillip Lloyd (Rod Steiger in a baffling choice of hairpiece) knows all about the things Amanda was cooking up in that lab of hers, and he’d do anything to posses it’s secrets… probably to add to the legions of monstrous murderous mutants he keeps in a secret prison. So anyway, John, his girlfriend Sharon (Talia Balsam), a cadre of students, and a devotee of his mother’s work, Melissa Leftridge (Max Headroom‘s Amanda Pays… and yes, I know she was in the ’90s Flash

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DanXIII

Nov 6, 2022

IndieMoviesReviews

Movie Review: Satan’s Little Helper (2004)

Lil’ Dougie (Alexander Brickel) loves two things; Satan (thanks to the eponymous video game he constantly plays which features ol’ Scratch) and his gorgeous sister Jenna (Katheryn Winnick)… and neither in a particularly healthy way. Now since Doug hearts Jenna so damn much that when she comes home from college to visit for Halloween with her brand-spankin’ new boyfriend Alex (Stephen Graham) he gets more than a little perturbed… until he meets an ominous man dressed in a grinning devil mask (Joshua Annex) arranging dead bodies as All Hallow’s Eve decorations. Naturally the little fool believes this rando psycho is the real deal come to life from his game, so he brings the murderous wine-guzzlin’, panty sniffin’, middle finger flippin’ monster home and hides him in the basement so he can kill ol’ Alex… and he does… eventually… and a whole mess of other people too! The question is, will our lad Doug realize this isn’t all just a game

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DanXIII

Nov 2, 2022

ForeignMoviesReviews

Movie Review: Quiet Days in Clichy (1970) – 4K Ultra HD

If there’s one thing about Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s 1970 adaptation of author Henry Miller’s 1956 semi-autobiographical novel Quiet Days in Clichy it’s that it’s light on plot… like lighter than a feather from a rather tiny bird light… and that is very light y’all, dig? The long and the short of it all is this; American writer-type Joey (Paul Valjean) and his euro-roomie Carl (Wayne Rodda) live in an apartment in Clichy in Paris. They are broke and horny, so what follows is a non-narrative debauchery free-for-all involving tons of nudity, un-simulated sex, and dubious choices in sexual partners… all set to the stirring tunes of Country Joe McDonald no less! By changing the setting from the 1930’s of the novel to the recently emerged sexual revolution of late 1960’s era Paris it becomes a natural for presenting the story without as much coherent narrative as one would expect (though the novel itself was no slouch in that department), Thorsen

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DanXIII

Oct 30, 2022

MoviesReviews

Movie Review: Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! (2022)

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the DVD I reviewed in this blog post. The opinions I share are my own. Halloween… seems like a damn solid time to lock my putrid peepers on some new Doo! Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! concerns the misadventures of Coco Diablo, a fashion designer who just so happened to be responsible for all of those freaky-fab monster suits all of those no-goodniks don to commit crimes that are always foiled by the super-sluthin’ of Mystery Inc. Speaking of Fred, Velma, Shaggy, Scooby, and Daphne, they are currently a lil’ light on work since the one that provides the monsters of the mysteries they are avowed to solve is cooling her jets behind bars… and you can bet things are going to get even more complicated since our gal Velma has a serious case of the horny’s for that fiendish fashion designer! This results in Fred becoming depressed, Daphne searching

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DanXIII

Oct 29, 2022

MoviesParanormalReviews

Movie Review: The Changeling (1980) – 3-Disc Special Edition

John Russell (George C. Scott), a talented composer and educator, moves to Seattle to begin a new life after his family is smashed to shit and back by a dump truck on an icy mountain road. Once there, John decides to take up residence in a massive historical mansion. As the days progress, it becomes clear as a bell that this place is unbelievably haunted as ol’ JR. starts hearing banging in the pipes, water running, the piano playing itself…oh, and there’s that pesky apparition of a damp kid…you know, what you would expect to find in a rental property. Instead of just getting another place to stay, Russell becomes obsessed with the houses original owners…a family that suffered a similar tragedy to his own, not knowing to leave supernatural shit the fuck alone, our steadfast hero hosts a séance which provides him more info on who is sharing the residence with him…and it isn’t pleasant…and manages to make the

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DanXIII

Oct 29, 2022

IndieMoviesReviews

Movie Review: The Once and Future Smash (2022)

The Once and Future Smash transports us to a universe where a series of fright flicks, the End Zone series by name, was the trendsetter of all mother fuckin’ trendsetters when it comes to our beloved stalk n’ slay slasher genre… right down to the series villain, cannibal football player Smash-Mouth (more on that dude in a second), being the supposed inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and the film’s twist being lifted wholesale by the original Friday the 13th! Speaking of Smash-Mouth, two actors had the distinction of playing the sinister sportsman, The egotistical Mikey Smash (The greasy strangler himself, Michael St. Michaels) who portrayed Smash-Mouth for the first hour of End Zone 2 and William Mouth (Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.’s Bill Weeden) who took over the role once Mikey was fired for reasons of being an asshole, and created the character’s catch-phrase “Touchdown!”… not that anyone has ever heard it as the last thirty minutes of End Zone

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DanXIII

Oct 28, 2022

IndieMoviesReviews

Movie Review: Bridge of the Doomed (2022)

Bridge of the Doomed starts things off right with some straight up, red-blooded mother fuckin’ action (which differs from regular “action” by one “mother fuckin’”s worth, which trust me is a considerable amount) with zombies rippin’ an army base a new one! After that frightful fracas, ol’ General Vasquez (the always great Robert LaSardo) gathers up Lt. Whitmore (Dane Bingenheimer) and Sgt. Hernandez (Kate Watson) and charges them and their troops with the task of defending a nearby bridge until reinforcements arrive. Soon our heroes are squaring off against hostile human survivors of the outbreak and the ever advancing shambling dead… but what lurks under that beastly bridge may be the biggest danger of them all! I’ll tell you one thing, director Michael Su (Death Count) and screenwriter Adrian Milnes (Night of the Tommyknockers) make double damn sure that Bridge of the Doomed is never, ever boring… this picture is filled to the brutal brim with all manner of action,

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DanXIII

Oct 27, 2022

DanXIII

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