From the opening title card proclaiming the film to be in “ShawScope” and the grainy, rainbow-patterned “Our Feature Presentation” clip that follows, it’s obvious that Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” is his grindhouse opus. Or at least half of it. Regardless, the movie revels in its chopsocky and giallo roots so feverishly that it would be difficult not to want to play along.

Uma Thurman stars as The Bride, a former member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, headed by the mysterious Bill (David Carradine, seen here only from the shoulders down). When she gets pregnant and attempts to leave her criminal past behind, Bill orders the Squad to
strike down her and the entire wedding party. But she survives and slips into a coma. When she awakens four years later—entropied, childless and bitter to the core—she literally makes out a
five-point checklist of people to kill.

End of story.

“Vol. 1” is simply Uma making her way through roughly half that list, tracking Viveca A. Fox to her new suburban-mom lifestyle and locating Lucy Liu, a Tokyo underworld boss, at The House
of Blue Leaves, a restaurant and club that serves as the movie’s immense, bloody, balls-out showdown. The action comes fast and furious and—in order to secure an R rating—sometimes in black-and-white. Blood spurts as it does in old-school samurai classics and 42nd St. staples like “Shogun Assassin”—like geysers. Yet the effect, in true Tarantino fashion, is comical. Never do you feel that the violence is real. Tarantino’s simple revenge tale has fun hopping drive-in genres, even switching to animation to tell the origin of Liu’s bloodthirsty character.

But what truly makes the movie is Uma. (Ethan Hawke, you are a stupid, stupid man.) She’s obviously gorgeous, but you’d never expect to see her kicking ***censored*** believably as she does here. The woman knows her way around a big, thick samurai sword and looks great even when drenched
in the entrails of her enemies. She receives great support from the other actors—it’s nice in particular to see “Street Fighter” Sonny Chiba excel in a straight dramatic role—but make no mistake: “Kill Bill” is all Uma.

It would be easy to overpraise this movie; it’s not the year’s best nor the most fun, but it’s an absolutely solid good time. I wanted “Vol. 2” to start rolling immediately, partly because I didn’t want it to end, and partly because it does feel like half a movie. But that half a movie is more tense and exciting than anything else right now.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

House of the Dead is based on a video game. Though its zombie-populated content may remind you of Resident Evil, the execution more resembles Super Mario Brothers. This Dead is utterly brainless and as, well, dead as a doornail.

Several extremely detestable college kids – no need to list the actors’ names; you shan’t heard from them again – are on their way to a Sega-sponsored rave on a secluded island, but miss their boat. They think nothing of dangling a grand in front of salty boat captain Jürgen Prochnow (20,000 leagues below Das Boot) and his hook-handed, fisherman-slicked, beady-eyed assistant Clint Howard to take them there. Prochnow (playing a character named Capt. Kirk – this film’s apex of comedy) is reluctant at first because of rumors of the island being haunted by evil spirits, but hey, apparently his life is worth a thousand bucks.

Upon arrival, the group finds the party grounds deserted. Normal people would think, “This ***censored*** ain’t right” and bolt, but these kids head for the keg and look for a place to copulate. Luckily for mankind, their sexual acts are forever postponed by the arrival of reanimated zombies intent on killing them. We root for the zombies, even though they look like they were created solely using materials from Party Galaxy.

Hope for the kids arrives in the form of marine inspector Ellie Cornell, who’s armed to the hilt and the only likeable character in the movie, and that’s because she was the cute big sister in Halloween 4 and 5. So naturally she doesn’t last too long. But with her help, they make their way to a deserted spooky house – to justify the title – wasting zombies all along the way in that ultra-edgy Matrix-y way, only without the budget or talent to pull it off (also not in the budget: licensing funds for Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” so they made their own sound-alike song). No matter – the filmmakers think the effect is so cool that each and every one of the protagonists gets his or her own 360? bullet-time spin-around shot, one right after the other. Even more embarrassing is that the action is interrupted randomly with footage from the video game, complete with onscreen titles reading “RELOAD” and “FREE PLAY.”

But what can we expect from a director named Uwe Boll (that’s German for “obstructed bowel”)? Or, for that matter, a production designer by the name of Tink? This is exactly the kind of lame, lazy, half-assed crap that the screenwriters use to trash mercilessly back when they wrote for the Film Threat family. It looks flat, sounds terrible, feels homemade and had me checking my watch a mere 12 minutes into it. Even the completely gratuitous nudity fails to become a mitigating factor when they don’t even show you breasts worth baring.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

John Carpenter’s They Live—now back and improved on DVD after being out-of-print for a few years—is an underrated little sci-fi movie. Its low budget shows throughout, but it has a surplus of imagination.

Wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper stars as a homeless drifter who uncovers a mass alien conspiracy to brainwash American citizens when he stumbles upon some magic sunglasses. When he slips them on, everything is in black and white, ads and signs are replaced by generic messages like “OBEY” and “CONSUME” and rich people have skeleton heads with glowing eyes.

In the mulleted Kurt Russell role, Piper’s a terrible actor, so they don’t give him a whole lot to say, but after he finds the X-Ray Specs, all of a sudden he’s QuipMaster 3000. The famous line is when he enters the bank with a gun and says, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ***censored***. And I’m all out of bubblegum,” but just about everything he says in this sequence is a bon mot, too:
* “You, you’re ok. This one, real ***censored***’ ugly.”
* “Mama don’t like tattletales!”
* “Life’s a ***censored***, and she’s back in heat!”

I love this movie. I merely liked it when I first saw it back in 1988, but it’s grown on me more and more over the years. It’s hard to hate a movie with a six-minute one-on-one street fight anyway. I found a pair of sunglasses once. They were sticky.

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Rod Lott is the publisher of Hitch Magazine: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity.

I already know what you’re asking: It’s another, treacle-filled Kindergarten Cop rip-off, isn’t it? Can indie auteur Richard Linklater pull off a mainstream comedy? After Shallow Hal, are we really ready for Jack Black as a leading man?

You see, I had the same questions. But let not your heart be troubled-School of Rock is the biggest surprise of the year. And even more than that, it’s also the funniest movie of the year.

Jack Black is Dewey Finn, a lovable loser who’s kicked out of his band for showing up the lead singer on stage. About to be ousted out of his apartment by his milquetoast substitute teacher roommate (screenwriter Mike White) and hot-but-bitchy girlfriend (the transcendent Sarah Silverman), Finn needs a job, so intercepting a phone call meant for the aforementioned milquetoast, he takes a job as a sub at an upscale prep-school.

This is where the movie should have taken the formulaic path, but instead opts for almost a spit-in-the-face attitude to that much trodden plot line. It’s in this way that School of Rock is like a Van Halen song-it may be about love, but it ain’t a love song. (I don’t know what that means, but it’s sounded very rock and roll, didn’t it?)

Dewey gets the kids to form a rock band (with him as lead), so he can win money in a battle of the bands contest. Sure, everybody learns valuable lessons and to believe in themselves and what not, but it’s not touchy-feely. (I cannot stress this point enough).

The kids (who actually play all their own instruments and sing) are phenomenal, especially Maryam Hassan, (Tomika, the shy back-up singer who comes into her own) who may be a kid but god-***censored*** that little girl can sing! Another standout is the keyboardist Robert Tsai, who’s almost as funny as Black himself.

That brings me to the actual songs-they are very good. Usually in movies with pre-packaged songs written by screenwriters, the music is horrible. But with Black at the helm, you knew that wouldn’t happen. “School of Rock”, the lead single form the film is catchy, toe-tapping fun, but wait for the credits, as Jack and the kids do a cover of “Long Way to the Top” by AC/DC.

Truth be told, the only problem I had with this movie were with two characters: Sarah Silverman and this stereotyped gay kid. Silverman, as I said before, is just there to be bitchy (really wasting her talents). The kid on the other hand, is just not funny. It’s just a broad stereotype that seems really out of place with the rest if the movie. But please take note these are only minor qualms.
Otherwise this movie a perfect, fun surprise that you don’t see coming. I don’t think anyone saw this one coming.

School of Rock is one class you don’t want to skip. A+.

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Louis Fowler is a frequent contributor to Cinema Eye and Hitch Magazine. He is also the publisher of Damaged Magazine, a new issue of which is coming soon.

In the beginning, there was The Omega Code. And when They saw the box-office grosses, They saw that it was good. And The Omega Code begat Megiddo: The Omega Code II, and They saw that it was good. And Megiddo begat Left Behind, and They saw that it was good.

And now Left Behind has begat Hangman’s Curse, perhaps the world’s first Christian paranormal teen horror film, and once again, it’s so bad, it’s good – a crazy combo of Omega Code, The X-Files and Spy Kids, with elements of Heathers and Arachnophobia thrown in just to muddy up an already messy mix.

David Keith and Mel Harris star as the parental units of the Springfield family, a gypsy-like clan that roves the country in an RV with their twin teenage children, Elisha and Elijah, and Max, the drug-sniffing dog, all working together as The Veritas Project, a crack freelance undercover investigations team. They’re hired by a public high school to uncover the truth behind a series of mysterious deaths that has so far claimed the lives of three football players. The bullied Goth kids – depicted as Satanists, of course – explain that the soul of Abel Frye, a kid who hung himself in the school years ago, is getting revenge on all classroom tormentors.

But the Springfields learn there’s more to the story than meets the eye. Donning baseball cap and spectacles, Keith unconvincingly goes incognito as the school janitor, while Harris looks at evidence under microscopes and calls for the assistance of a nutty professor, played by Frank Peretti, author of the book on which the film is based. I can understand cutting him a little slack since these characters are his and all, but Peretti is no actor and seems to think the dramatic narrative is sturdy enough to support his decision to channel Bruce Dern, Jerry Lewis and Prof. Irwin Corey. God bless him for being wrong, because he provides the film with some of its funniest moments. (The honor for the funniest, however, goes to the scene in which virginal Elisha wraps a snake around her neck and comments, “It reminds me of a boyfriend I once dated.”)

The kids are the real stars of the film, especially Elisha, who says “Oh, snaps!” whenever she forgets something or something doesn’t go away. Like, for instance, plunging down an air duct in the school and landing in the nest of hybrid killer spiders? The tumble and resulting spider bites nearly kill her, but she’s saved by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Oh, and a fresh dose of anti-venom.

And whom did the Christian backers hire to helm their ham-fisted, underlit, amateurishly acted cinematic testament of God’s love? Rafal Zielinski, director of such noted church faves as Screwballs, Screwballs II, Screwball Hotel and National Lampoon’s Last Resort. Maybe he convinced them he could get thirtysomething’s Harris to star in their project. Harris, by the way, is currently on her fifth marriage. How Christian!