Posts tagged Star Wars

by Tim May

Hell High begins with a little girl witnessing a guy trying to fuck his girlfriend in an outhouse around ten in the morning. “We haven’t got all day!” he says. It’s still early, sir. After the girlfriend refuses, they get on his motorcycle and drive away recklessly, of course crashing, and killing them both.

We jump ahead 18 years, and the little girl is now a science teacher named Miss Storm, teaching a bunch of cretin high school children. “I’m here to help you, if you’ll only give me a chance!” she pleads with them. She gets so fed up with their behavior, she slaps one of them. Dickens, the kid that got slapped, has a group of friends including Jon Jon (seriously), a poor man’s Scot Baio, and a girl named Queenie who obviously wants to be Madonna. There’s also this fat scumbag named Smiler.

Look at this creature. He looks like his mother ate approximately 25 deviled hams per day during her pregnancy, and instead of digesting them properly, her cow of an unborn child kept them all to himself. Smiler is (of course) an idiot without a single thought in his brain. He pretty much just giggles constantly, and he always pronounces Jon Jon’s name “Jar Jar.”

Dickens and Jon Jon follow the teacher home from school and peep on her while she’s taking a shower, rubbing her tits with soap. Dickens and Jon Jon are pretty much ready to jerk off right outside the window (“Oh yeah, don’t stop,” “She likes it!”).

So far, this revenge plot seems pretty tepid, but these punk kids have more mischief up their sleeves! They ruin a pointless high school football game by driving their car onto the field and stealing the ball. King.

Dickens somehow convinces the rest of them to break into Miss Storm’s house and wreak some havoc. They all get on ridiculous Halloween masks and start stomping on her roof and flinging Nickelodeon slime-like material through her window.  This somehow brings back memories of the motorcycle accident she witnessed as a child. When they attempt to flee, Dickens stays behind (because he’s so “bad”) to try to scare the shit out of her some more. He seriously starts raping her! This movie just took a turn. Queenie comes in, presumably to stop him, but then she climbs on top of Miss Storm and “shows him how it’s done.” Huh?

When Jon Jon comes in to stop them, he and Dickens get into a brawl, and in the confusion, Miss Storm jumps out of the window. Jon Jon spends the rest of the film trying to clear all of their names.

Hell High is an interesting film. It starts out as a high school comedy and turns into a relatively effective horror film. I’ll admit I found the first half hour of the film to be more entertaining, especially the driving scenes, which are beautifully shot and set to great songs by some guy named John Shannon. The film was shot in 1986, but not released until ’89, because Christopher Stryker, who played Dickens, died shortly after the end of production. We have the ’89 Prism release (side note: I love Prism’s animated intro on this), which has a nice cover and couple cool taglines (“Where the students are dying to graduate,” “The teachers are tough…and their exams are murder”), but really, Hell High is barely a high school movie. In fact, the original title was What Do You Want to Do Tonight? It has more in common with Larry Clark’s Bully than most teen slasher films. It’s kind of uneven, but I admire its ambition.

(Source: vhshitfest)

by Tim May, Dan Kinem, and Dabeedoo

Check out our first video review, for The Ewok Adventure below. Thanks to our boy Dabeedoo for editing this for us! It turned out great!

(Source: vhshitfest)

by Tim May

No, it’s not the British pickled onion snack, Space Raiders is actually one of the multitude of Star Wars ripoffs that came out in the early eighties. Most of these films had many of the surface elements of George Lucas’s space saga, but none of the heart. Space Raiders is, sadly, not an exception to this rule.

The film opens with a scene in some factory on a colony called Procyon 3, which is run by “The Company,” this film’s answer to the Galactic Empire. A voice on the intercom spills out a bunch of annoying tech jargon, always pronouncing the word robot as “robutt.” Anyway, a bunch of smugglers are trying to escape, and some annoying kid named Peter stows away on their ship. He’s soon discovered and the ship’s captain, Han Sol—I mean, “Hawk” needs to figure out a way to make his shipment, and also return Peter to his home on Procyon 3.

Just to show how “rogue-ish” the crew of this space ship is, after Peter calls one of them “sir,” the crewman says, “What kind of kids are they raising these days? Nobody calls me ‘sir.’” Most of the crew members are just your average Han Solo pastiches, but one of them is an alien who acts like Spock but looks like a Ferengi.

This is the worst kind of sci-fi movie. There’s no creativity whatsoever. We’re just supposed to accept anything as a “futuristic” object if they put the word space in front of it. Does that seem like an ordinary refrigerator to you? No, no, sir, that is a space refrigerator! Hawk isn’t just wearing an ordinary vest—it’s a space vest! Everything in space is Space Everything.

I honestly can’t even recall what the crew’s mission was, but I know at some point, it involved them going to a place that was oddly similar to the Mos Eisley Cantina, where some MASSIVE HEADED beaked women were singing an atrocious pop song. An alien prostitute propositions herself to Peter and one of the crewmen, asking, “Wanna have a good time?” to which the crewman says, “We’re having a good time,” and shuffles Peter along past her.

After the cantina stop, the crew is on it’s way back to Procyon 3 to bring Peter home. Problem is, the scruffy crew has grown attached to the little rascal. One of them is happy to be rid of him, however, proclaiming (as a negative), “You bring out the good in me.” The ship gets caught in an asteroid field (Empire). Peter wishes for the Space God to send the asteroids to hell, saying, “I hate rocks. Damn them!”

The crew obviously gets Peter back home. Some complications ensue, a couple people die, you know the drill. The film’s score was composed by James Horner, a fact I thought would be a positive for the film. However, while the music was pretty good, it’s lifted directly from the earlier Roger Corman produced Star Wars ripoff, Battle Beyond the Stars! Not only that, almost all of the space scenes were also lifted from that film! This is some Godzilla’s Revenge level shit!

When we bought this film, I joked that it looked like The Phantom Menace, what with the kid being dragged into space and all. For all of it’s flaws, The Phantom Menace at least had Liam Neeson and the insanely cool lightsaber duel at the end. Space Raiders has nothing. It takes the absolute worst tropes of ’80s sci-fi and throws them all into one movie. Boring trash.

(Source: vhshitfest)