Tag: martial arts
I have selfish reasons for wanting to see Day Shift. Yeah, it’s a movie about a black vampire hunter and all, but it was also filmed in my stomping ground of the San Fernando Valley -- something I became acutely aware of months before its release when production shut...
To say that Rudy Ray Moore is an acquired taste is like saying that Paris Hilton has no talent. Duh. His blue stand-up act aside, his films are low on budget and even lower on subtlety. Petey Wheatstraw, based on one of his acts, is the closest any of...
Ever since Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, I've had a general rule about avoiding movies with two unrelated titles squished into one, but Tony Todd headlining a zombie prison flick will always get my attention. Thus, we have Shadow: Dead Riot. The story centers around Shadow (Todd), a serial killer-slash-serial...
I knew I was in trouble when I saw that the DVD cover for this film said "Vampire Assassins," while the title screen read the singular "Vampire Assassin". Damn, continuity issues before the movie even begins! The second warning sign came when 10 or 15 minutes passed without me seeing...
Essentially an "urban" version of From Dusk Till Dawn or Vamp, Cryptz revolves around a strip club run by female vampires. As is the norm with Full Moon/Big City Pictures urban horror pics, our heroes are (yawn) wannabe rappers, but thankfully we don't have to suffer through any performances...
Although I was just a child in the '70s, my memories of the time are still quite vivid: shirtlessness ran rampant, afros knew no race and everyone -- EVERYONE -- practiced kung-fu. Exhibit A: Devil's Express, a lovably terrible martial arts/horror hybrid that was the would-be star vehicle for...
An otherwise inept horror film, Devon's Ghost is noteworthy as one of the rare non-"urban" slashers to star a black woman as the "final girl". The gal in question is Karan Ashley, who also co-wrote, produced and edited the film, which goes a long way to explaining how she...
Hellbound is an '80s movie trapped in 1994, from the Miami Vice attire to the police chief outraged at her "loose cannon" cop to, well, Chuck Norris, the aforementioned loose cannon. And, of course, there's the black sidekick, doing what black sidekicks of the '80s did best (besides dying):...
