Sometimes rhetorical questions are better off remaining rhetorical. For example: how many offensive caricatures can you fit into one dinosaur movie?

Hold Dinosaurus!‘ beer (I think I punctuated that right) and watch this. It has Mexican day-laborers, O’Leary the drunken Irishman, a sinister vaguely-Latin-American villain, his “little tamale” (a Central-American woman who knows how to make molotov cocktails), lazy black folks … and I’m not even counting the Comic Relief Neanderthal, or Dumpy the friendly bulldozer driver.

Shot in St Croix, Virgin Islands, it’s the story of two well-preserved undersea dinosaur remains that are dragged up onshore for exhibition. But they turn out to have been only hibernating, and a tropical rainstorm thaws them out and sends the movie on its way. The Neanderthal? Was sort of along for the ride.

The T-rex eats people and things. But mostly people. It fights the friendly Brontosaurus. A little boy is sad. The Neanderthal has comic escapades around the island. The villain kidnaps our heroine, but she is rescued by the Neanderthal. Our hero fights the T-Rex with a construction crane.

One of the random background extras looks a lot like James Baskett (Uncle Remus from Song of the South), so my notes say things like “more racist stereotypes, with cameo by Uncle Remus” and “Uncle Remus clapping unenthusiastically.”

In the end, the white people triumph with good ol’ white people ingenuity.

Offensive Shaolin Longfist was an incoherent movie, and I don’t have much coherent to say about it. Many of the character names aren’t mentioned aloud in the English dub, so for most of the movie, Pang was the only name we knew. There are gratuitous shaolin backflips and random bird noises. There is chess-style kung fu, and inappropriate wocka-chicka funky porn music. Maybe it made sense in the original Korean.

The plaintive guitar melody wafts across the night sky. You can hear a male folksinger-type voice crooning that “Ninja’s just another word for … nothin’ left to light.”

Tough Ninja the Shadow Warrior might have been better if I could see what was going on in the first 20ish minutes of the movie. Or perhaps not. It might have ruined the “mystique.”

The movie starts with a bunch of young adult types being recruited to ninja training camp. Turns out that ninja training camp is more rigorous than they expected, so they attempt to escape. Some are killed. A few escape unscathed. Our protagonists are injured in the escape, because the ninjas set dogs on them.

The ninjas. Set dogs (loudly barking). On them. At night.

These are some Ninjas Unclear On The Concept Of Stealth.

Lily is bitten by a dog, but she and Jenny and a couple of guys manage to escape. Luckily, they are found by kindly Uncle Brown. He gets jobs for them.

Whoops, it turns out that kindly Uncle Brown is a procurer of flesh for the mobster Yamada. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. Yamada is Japanese. You can tell by how they refer to him as “The Jap” about every other time. It’s mostly only a wee bit racist. Mostly.

There is a second plot with some ninjas upset about a gang of fake ninjas which are stealing jewels, thus bringing attention from the authorities to the real ninjas. The real ninjas intend on combating this by stealing the jewels from the fake ninjas. Which will somehow make the authorities forget about the real ninjas? Sadly, we never see this.

Lily’s aunt pays her ransom to get her away from the procurers. Lily’s aunt gives Lily a job. As a hostess. This turns out to be a bad idea. The other hostesses don’t like Lily. They try to ambush her outside of work. They claim they’re “the female ninjas.” Lily says that she hates ninjas.

Lily beats up all five of the “female ninjas.” Lily is probably the second-best fighter in the movie (second only to … Yamada).

Jenny is freed from the flesh procurers by one of the guys she escaped with from Camp Ninja (I think — there are a lot of mostly-interchangeable guys in this one). He gets beaten up. He asks his uncle for a job, but his uncle refuses because of Yamada.

There is an entirely-unexpected sequence of extortions (both successful and attempted) in a series of men’s rooms. At urinals. In use.

There is also more foreplay in a gratuitous sex sequence than I have ever seen in a ninja / kung fu movie. Toe-sucking set to a whimsical Casio soundtrack.

There is something wrong with Lily. She keeps getting fevers. She’s very thirsty.

At the end, she is able to defeat Yamada by growling and biting him. Are they intending to imply that Lily is rabid?

At the end of the other part of the movie, a ninja garbed in white shows up (for the first time!) and takes out the boss of the ninjas that ran Camp Ninja.

This movie is produced by Tomas Tang and directed by Godfrey Ho (under a pseudonym). These movies don’t often make a lot of sense, but this one makes even less sense than most. It feels like they were groping in the dark toward their formula — but they hadn’t found it yet.

Life is hard in 1939 when you’re a red-blooded patriotic American young man with a twisted leg who wants nothing more than to ship off to Germany or Japan as a soldier (*).

Danny Coogan makes chairs. Damn fine woodworker. His brother Donny is a soldier.

There is a Monsieur Toulon who has a mysterious glowing liquid and a case of puppets — and he’s being sought by the Germans and Japanese (whose agents have a strange passive-aggressive relationship).

Soon, Monsieur Toulon is dead, Donny is dead, and Donny’s girlfriend has been captured by The Enemy. Danny mixes some of his brother’s fluids into the green liquid and injects it into a new puppet, then sets out to seek vengeance.

Ultimately, don’t think too hard about anything in Puppetmaster: Axis of Evil. The puppets have a better emotional range than the characters. It’s directed by David DeCoteau (**), and its badness is kept firmly under-the-top, tongue only briefly flirting with cheek.

Or as Amy said, “Well, that was terrible … but competently made.”


(*) Don’t come at me, come at the movie.


(**) Per Amy, DeCoteau’s artistic vision was seriously compromised because there is not one scene of Danny, Donny, or Monsieur Tolon wearing only boxer briefs and socks. Similarly, there are no scenes of any humans smearing oil onto smooth, muscled chests. No promises about the puppets, though!

Skinned Deep was a very odd and highly-entertaining movie. Did it start with an actual branding sequence? Yes. Did it have male nudity? Also yes. Does it feature Warwick Davis? Again, yes. Am I getting ahead of myself? Entirely so.

This movie was well-directed, and the set dressing was phenomenal. Everyone involved put a lot of effort into this movie. It was clearly a labor of love. In Greek philosophy, there are 7 different kinds of love: Eros, Philia, Storge, Agape, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia. This falls squarely in the Ludus category. The movie is playful and flirtatious with its audience. It’s a no-strings-attached, something-odd-is-going-on, wait-that’s-actually-bonkers kind of love.

The Rockwell family (father, mother, son, daughter) are taking a road trip, but they find themselves lost, with a flat tire. They hike to a nearby convenience store / gas station. The proprietress, Granny, invites them to stay and eat a meal with her family while one of her sons goes to fix the car. Her sons are: Plates (Warwick Davis), Brains, and the Surgeon General.

It doesn’t take long before the father, mother, and son are dead — and the daughter, Tina, is imprisoned in a room covered in newspapers. The bulk of the movie is Tina attempting to escape from captivity, while at the same time Brains is courting her (to Granny’s disapproval).

There are some fun action set pieces (one involving elderly bikers, another involving moving vehicles). Brains shows Tina how to ride a motorcycle and imagines running naked through the streets of New York City.

Tina discovers the reasons why Granny’s family is the way they are (sort of), and ultimately escapes (…or does she?), but the journey is one that will stick with you like a heaping mouthful of peanut butter: tasty, and difficult to excavate.

“I didn’t know if you were hungry, so I brought you some soup and money.” This is one deeply odd movie that I wouldn’t mind watching again. There is some gore, but it’s not fetishized.