bad/awesome flixxx review: Keoma (1976)

One of the final great "spaghetti westerns", KEOMA was a last hurrah and a shining triumph of what the genre had been, and could have been. In 1976, when most of the steam had already run out of these types of flicks, and they had moved on from serious dramas to shitty parodies or even shittier "western comedies", Franco Nero brought to life the story of a "half-breed" hell bent on making up for lost time.



KEOMA is the tale of Keoma, a half-white, half-native American man who has returned from the civil war to his home in the old west. Upon his return he finds his old town run by a corrupt Confederate soldier who's got a posse of assholes that ride roughshod all over the citizens of the town. Something has infected the water and given some of the townsfolk the "plague". The bad guy (Mr. Caldwell) won't let anyone leave town except to go to an old mine to die if they are sick enough. Keoma sees them taking a bunch of them to the mine, and he rescues this pregnant lady, and takes her back to town. The townsfolk are pissed, b/c they think she has the plague and might infect them.



Other things aren't working out so well for ol Keoma either. His dad, who used to be the main ass kicker in town, never even leaves his ranch anymore b/c things are so fucked. His 3 bigtime asshole half brothers are in cahoots with Caldwell, and they've been kicking Keoma's ass since their ol man brought him back from the reservation. His only friend in the world, who was his dad's ranchhand, and was also a badass with a bow and arrow, is now the town drunk. Plus there's this old witch that Keoma sees all the time, who's haunting him and asking him "why he came back?", and "isn't he tired of killing?" Keoma always has a tuff as hell answer for her. "Everyone deserves a chance to be born", or "I go alone because I AM alone", or "I do what I do because I am free, and that is the only way to be free." or some shit like that. He's tuff like I said. Plus, Franco Nero had KILLER steez. Ive never seen so much style. There's so much action in this flick... It really has everything you could ask for in a western. There's a fucking 15-20 minute shootout that's like 3 on 50 or so. I don't wanna give away the juicy bits though. The only thing that is annoying about this one is this running ballad theme that narrates throughout the film. It sort of has a BILLY JACK vibe about it, but its really bad, in that its this really shrill ladies voice describing what's happening as it transpires. "you have to go and save her now, you get up on your horse and ride away as fast as it will take youuuu!" HA! it really is like that. And then like, a really out of key drunken sounding dude is singing as if he is Keoma, or responding/narrating in the song.... anyway, that part sucks. But not enough for you to not totally understand that this is a hell of a western. I'm gonna find some more of these to watch, as this was enjoyable. Aloha from somewhere in PA!!

"Put a little insanity on yer potato"

NEW FREE VALIENT THORR SONG!! NEW SITE IS LIVE!! CHECK IT!

ALAHOYUS TRUE BELIEVERS! The day has finally arrived. Tomorrow, we launch out with our friends MASTODON, BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, & BARONESS on the 2010 Volcom Tour.
To celebrate, we decided to give all the Thorriors out there a present. Cassius Thorr designed a new website for us, and we thought you might like to hear ONE OF THE NEW SONGS from our album we recorded with Jack Endino last month!!
So click right here, and it'll take you to the home page and then enter your email. We’ll send you a link to download our new jam “DOUBLECROSSED” – wait for it……….. FOR FREE. Spread the news. We play around 6:30 every night, so leave work early, have a few cocktails, and help us get the party started right! So excited to be back out there with ya! See you all soon,
VALIENT THORR

bad/awesome flixxx review: John Carpenter's: Prince of Darkness (1987)

wow, here's a hard to find horror classic. and after checking out the critic's reviews, it seems like a lot of people didn't enjoy this flick! made just one year after (probably) my favorite movie ever- BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, and one year before THEY LIVE, Victor (Egg Shen!) Wong and Dennis (Wang!) Dun return in John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS.



Man it took me forever to find a copy of this. I love John Carpenter. Besides VAMPIRES, i can't really find any fault in the man's career. I don't know why this movie never made it as big as some of his others. Maybe because it was distributed by a new company at the time, who knows? Straight up tho? I'm gonna say this is one of his top films. you got BIG TROUBLE, this one, HALLOWEEN, THE THING, & ESCAPE FROM NY. top 5. oh sure there's plenty more. What's gonna make you wanna watch this one? How about Alice Cooper's frequent cameo as a satanic homeless person? How about a story involving a canister thats over a million years old containing a glowing green swirling liquid thats supposed to the anti-christ in an old abandoned church in LA? one that was supposedly buried in the desert by his father the Super Devil who was banished to the dark side of a mirror by an alien named Jesus? one where bugs are crawling all over dudes eating their hands and heads off, girls puking in other girls mouths, dudes puking in other girls mouths, everyone puking in everyones mouths, remote psychic tachyon visions replacing dreams, fountains of demonic liquid infesting a young student and possessing her, a dude jabbing a stake into his own neck, and all kinds of students and scientists dying in various ways. I just don't have the heart to give out everything here, because I believe this bastard deserves the chance to be viewed by you. There are some unbelievable scenes in this film, very subtle things that stand out. The vibe of the damn thing is creepy throughout the whole thing. The story is extremely well written. The music is amazing (as it almost always is in his films, of course done all by himself), and the end scene is great. I think the only problem people may have is some of the acting. But, seriously it's not that bad, and I think the story actually holds its own even if you don't like the acting. I highly recommend finding this, although I've only ever come across it on vhs. I think they just released it on DVD finally. check it out big time. thumbs up, aces, whatever. find it! Fucking terrifying and worth every penny.

bad/awesome flixxx review: A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

with an impending remake in the can, and a whole franchise of sequels, including a tv show to tempt me into watching more, I decided to revisit what some call the greatest slasher movie of all time. Robert Englund, John Saxon, and Johnny Depp in his big screen debut, ladies and gents, I give you Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET.



ok, There are literally thousands of shitty movies I wanna review, most of which I have never seen, but I have a few here that I've either been given or downloaded a while back, and I need the space on my harddrive, so I'm dusting some of them off before I delete them. This isn't any new territory here, I'm not gonna be telling you anything about this flick that you don't already know. Most of the time these dudes making the remakes fuck them up royally so that no one even gives a shit to see any of the other ones. That was the case for me when someone told me about a new Nightmare remake. I tossed it around in my head a bit and came to this conclusion: well, its better than trying to sell us another sequel. The interesting piece of information here is that the dude playing Freddy in the new movie, Jackie Earl Haley actually went to the auditions of this first film bringing along his buddy Johnnie Depp who ended up getting a part. Jackie Earl Haley is the long haired motorcycle kid from the first BAD NEWS BEARS. He was also in another bad/awesome flick reviewed last summer called DAMNATION ALLEY. But enough about the new shit, let's talk about this one. We all know the plot: Cute blonde chick has a nightmare about a dude trying to kill her. She finds out her friend Nancy had the same dream the next day. So Nancy and her boyfriend Glen (Depp) decide to sleep over to make Tina feel better. Tina's cool boyfriend busts in on them and takes Tina up to her mom's bedroom to bang. Johnny Depp tries to bang Nancy, but she's like, "no, we're supposed to be here for Tina." Bummer. After Rod and Tina pass out from sex exhaustion, Tina has another dream about the knife finger dude. She sees a goat, and Freddy chops his own fingers off! Then Rod wakes up to her screaming and he's freaking out, and she's getting cut open somehow, and he's like,"what the fuck?" "help!" "this is crazy, this is crazy!" and Tina's getting dragged up the wall and onto the ceiling and blood is everywhere, and it just looks bad for ol Rod. He freaks out and bolts. They accuse him of murder and catch him the next day. Nancy freaks out, she can't sleep cause she keeps having these nightmares, and she starts getting this skunk streak in her hair (that's pretty rad). And she goes to see ol Rod, and he gets strangled by Freddy thru his dreams by his sheets. Nancy goes ballistic, denies sleep, then her mom takes her to a Dream clinic. She has another dream, and she's running away from Freddy (who isn't named yet btw) and she wakes up with a burn on her arm and freddy's hat! She pulled it into reality! So the mom freaks out, the neighbors hate Nancy cause she sucks, they don't want their boy hanging with that creep of a girl and her punk rock quaff. Nancy's mom tells her the story of a killer named Fred Krueger who killed like 20 kids and then was released from jail because the cops didn't sign a form or something. So then some angry parents, and I'm not sure if she meant her parents, or like her friends who are all of nancy's friends parents now (?) all burned Fred alive. Then to "comfort" her she takes her to the basement and grabs this bladed knife glove out of her fireplace because of course that's gonna make everyone feel better! You got this dead guy's fucking killing glove in your fireplace! That's why he's fucking haunting you! HA! So she boards up the house and Johnny Depp gets turned into a bloody geyser, and then theres a chase and some HOME ALONE style booby traps, and then freddy's on fire (again) and then he sucks Nancy's mom into the bed. And then it was all a dream. And then Freddy is a car, and then he "here's Johnny's" the mom thru a window on the door. Wow. I think I need to watch the second one, cause this one was lacking on the goods. That scene where Freddy's arms extend across the alley to scratch the walls? Hilarious. My favorite lines? At the end Nancy tells Freddy, "You're nothing! You're shit!" And that just about sums up a lot of these movies. More soon bad movie lovers!

bad/awesome flixxx review: Runaway (1984)

"It is the future", except for everything sucks and the cars look like its the past, and the robots are pretty shitty. But you do have Tom Selleck, Gene Simmons, Kirsty Alley, and fuckin Mauser from Police Academy in his same role in a Micheal Crichton(!) film- RUNAWAY.



This was a childhood favorite. All i could remember about it was that there was a bad guy (Gene Simmons) who had a bunch of robot spiders who would jump on you and stick a needle in your neck BEFORE exploding and setting you on fire! Need I type more? ok... well, Tom Selleck is a very serious cop with a new hot partner chick and his son is the kid from FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR. He has vertigo, which may or may not be a nod of the hat to Hitchcock. There is a very similiar scene in which he's waaay up at the very tip top of an elevator about two floors above an unfinished building and has to peer over the side much like Jimmy Stuart in VERTIGO. Besides that Gene Simmons has an awesome gun that shoots heat seeking missile bullets, and his girlfriend is Kirsty Alley, and she has to take her clothes off looking for bugs. No nudity on her (thank christ) but there is a nice rack that shows up at one point. What else? Flying camerabots called "floaters", and these badass robots that are dumped thru the floorboard of this car, that zoom thru traffic and explode on intended targets. The final scene is pretty awesome and Gene Simmons has a moment that will make you piss yerself laughing. totally worth a watch. B-. Bonus spiderbot kill to follow:

"you shoulda seen that cocksucker's face when i took out that knife"

bad/awesome flixxx review: Beastmaster 2- Through the Portal of Time (1991)

wow. i will never ceased to be amazed by the flicks that are out there. i was so curious about the sequel to Beastmaster after watching the first one (because truly, these reviews are supposed to be about bad AND awesome movies- and Beastmaster doesn't really qualify as bad. its just awesome) that I went and found a copy of Beastmaster 2. and I was not disappointed. It truly sucked (in an awesome way).




One of the reasons that I liked the Beastmaster so much was that when I was younger (on earth) it reminded me of Masters of the Universe. Dar was kind of like He-Man, and he pretty much had his own battle cat, and his world looked like Eternia. The only thing that ever remotely sucked about He-man (besides that fact that they never killed anyone) was the truly horrible movie adaptation w/ Dolph Lundgren. In that movie, I'm guessing they didn't really have the budget to make a realistic world filled with baddies that looked similar to Beastmaster the original. So what was their solution? Come up with some bullshit story about a "cosmic key" and bring He-Man and his cohorts over into Earth, and film in LA. That all happened in 1987, four years before Beastmaster 2 was made. I guess the director was like, fuck it, let's rape this one too. To be fair, I guess this one could have worked if they left the whole LA part out, but then everyone would complain that it was just another sword and sorcery flick. But some of the continuity mistakes were atrocious. His bird isn't even the same color. It was a huge black bird in the first one, this time it's like a brown, and sometimes white eagle. Rrrugh (his tiger) was a huge black tiger in the first one, and in this one he's a lean Bengal tiger. Somehow Kodo and Podo are back even though one of them died saving Dar from Mayax in the first one. (now, the chick ferret had babies in the last one, so these could be the babies of the OG Kodo and Podo. who knows?). What else? Well, a brief plot outline: Dar is captive to the evil Arklon in the beginning but of course escapes. As he's being chased in the swamp, he meets a monster thats like a cross between the Swamp Thing and the big ass Orcs from LOTR. It shoots red light from its eyes. but it sees Dar's hand, and goes, "yo, I was your dads sister one time. You have a big brother, who's a dick, you have to go west and kill him." So Dar sets out, meanwhile Arklon meets up with this witch who is way hotter than the witches in the last one. She tells him of this secret portal (that looks like StarGate- which came out in 94- interesting) and he also has a cosmic zapping "key" (see what i mean?). She tells him of this ultimate nullifier bomb the military has (in LA??) that looks like a pony keg with a timer on it. Just before they can enter the doorway, they cut to this scene of a chick zooming around LA getting chased by cops, and then they crash in the doorway. The chick is "like way totally rad the max, k?" Gag ME with a spoon. Dar befriends her and they chase Arklon and the witch into the portal and Dar figures out that Arklon is his long lost older bro. it gets worse from here. They totally make Dar out to be a kook. There's even a scene where they are driving around LA, and they pass by a movie theater and BEASTMASTER 2 is on the marquee. Dar looks into the screen like "what?!" WAH-WAH-WAAAAH. pretty much a bummer, but it makes me VERY interested in how bad beastmaster 3 could be. can i even handle it? enjoy boys and ghouls!

VALIENT THORR EURO SUMMER TOURDATES!!

Valient Thorr Euro Summer Tourdates 2010

Alahoyus to you all today! We will be hitting the road this summer in Europe. Here are the initial gig dates, with more coming soon. Please help us spread the word!
more soon, Valient Himself

* Jun 17 2010- HELLFEST 2010- Clisson, France
* Jun 19 2010- Elektra Tuinfeest 2010- Sliderecht/ Rotterdam, Netherlands*
* Jun 20 2010- Trix- Antwerpen, Belgium
* Jun 23 2010- Schaubude- Kiel, Germany
* Jun 24 2010- Hafenklang- Hamburg, Germany
* Jun 25 2010- White Trash- Berlin, Germany
* Jun 26 2010- Alter Schlachthof- Eisenach, Germany
* Jun 27 2010- Podium Asterix- Leeuwarden, Netherlands
* Jun 28 2010- Little Devil- Tillburg, Netherlands
* Jun 29 2010- Riders Park/ L’entrepot- Arlon, Belgium
* Jun 30 2010- Volxbad- Flensburg, Germany
* Jul 1 2010- ROSKILDE FESTIVAL 2010- ROSKILDE, DENMARK
* Jul 3 2010- Gaskessel Barbarie Festival 2010- Biel/ Bienne, Switzerland
* Jul 6 2010- Nachtleben- Frankfurt, Germany
* Jul 7 2010- Eden- Ulm, Germany
* Jul 8 2010- Sedel- Luzern, Switzerland
* Jul 9 2010- Volxhaus- Klagenfurt, Austria
* Jul 10 2010- ROCK IM RING FESTIVAL 2010- Südtirol/ Botzen, Italy
* Jul 15 2010- Viper Room- Vienna, Austria
* Jul 16 2010- PMK- Innsbruck, Austria
* Jul 20 2010- Estraperio- Barcelona, Spain
* Jul 21 2010- Ritmo & Compas- Madrid, Spain
* Jul 22 2010- Music Box- Lisbon, Portugal
* Jul 23 2010- Piano B- Porto, Portugal
* Jul 24 2010- Azkena- Bilbao, Spain
* Jul 27 2010- Grotta Rosso- Rimini, Italy
* Jul 28 2010- Sabotage Bar- Vicenza, Italy
* Jul 30 2010- Festivalkult! U&D 2010- Porta, Germany
* Jul 31 2010- ROADKILL FESTIVAL 2010- Waarschoot, Belgium

bad/awesome flixxx review: The Beastmaster (1982)

what a score! I found this on DVD for $3.99. A favorite of mine from way back in my Venusian days, Marc Singer, John Amos, and Rip Torn star in this badass Conan style fantasy film from the director of Phantasm, Don Coscarelli!



I'm not gonna give you a total play by play on this one, b/c I think it totally deserves a look up or a rental or whatever. I dug it so much, I'm gonna look for Beastmaster 2 (which is most probably terrible). Anyway, to give you the brief rundown here, Rip Torn (Mayax) is like a big shit sorcerer, and he works for this King Zed. Zed's wife is pregnant, and these witches that work for him tell him that the King's unborn son is gonna kill him. So Mayax is like, "bullshit, I'll kill him first" and he sends one of the witches to kill the baby (still inside the mother). The witch transports the baby from the womb of the queen to a cow's belly, kills the queen, and they lock Zed up for years. The witch gets the baby from the cow and brands his hand and is about to sacrifice him when this old peasant dude comes outta the woods and chops her with this handy little boomerang blade thing. Then he raises Marc Singer (Dar) as his own. When Dar is a teenager, his old man notices that Dar has psychic powers with animals and tells him he's special. Fast forward, and this gang of assholes called the Junn Horde burns Dar's village to the ground, killing his dad and his dog. So he goes off to kill them and meets a black lion, a black magic hawk, 2 cute little ferrets, an unbelievably hot redheaded chick named Kiri (who he bangs, and then later finds out its his own cousin, but they never say shit about it. hey, if its good for Jerry Lee Lewis, right?). Later on he meets John Amos and some kid who is his little brother. Seeing John Amos in this makes me wanna watch "Coming To America" really bad. This flick has beautiful scenery, rad views, animal telepathy, animal sight kinda like in Thundercats with the sword of omens, rings with fucking eyeballs in them, witches, Rip Torn with braids and skull bow-bows, these Bird worshipping dudes that can wrap their arm/wing/talons around someone and suck them dry til there is only bones left, and these berzerker dudes with toxic green leech earwigs driving them insane



one thing bothers me about the film upon further review.. at the end when Dar is fighting the main Junn Horde dude that looks like the guy from the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon with the big headdress, why doesn't he use his freakin animal psychic powers on that dudes horse?? He could have just told the horse to dump his ass in the fuckin fiery moat, know what I'm sayin? Also, one other cool thing, our good friends in the NC band Caltrop named a song off of their last album "Junn Horde". They are awesome, check them out. And if you dig sword and sorcery flicks, this has you written all over it. I personally prefer it to both Conan flicks... more soon prettys!