Movie Reviews: The thread that is as numerous as Friday the 13th movies

The Nun:
Nuns: they are widely considered the most frightening creatures on Earth. They roam convents, doing horrifying things like taking vows of poverty or praying the rosary or sometimes nursing people. It is high time someone that is not Italian made a movie about how scary nuns are!

The above, I assume, is the thought process of whatever weird executive at WB greenlight this movie. And American consumers ate it up. After all, the movie theaters had to show SOMETHING other than "Crazy Rich Asians" in 2018.

The movie begins with a convent in Romania in 1952, which was apparently around 20 years before Edison invented the lightbulb. Like all convents, there are scribblings on the walls about how God is not powerful enough to stop demons and nuns telling each other that relics (rather than, you know, God) are the keys to salvation. Also, for some reason, the Catholic nuns in Romania speak perfect English to one another. Two nuns walk into a room, where one... well, I would say she got jumped, but it would have been the quietist mugging ever. Maybe a demon threw gazpacho at her. She then warns the second nun that "not even God can save..." before the Gazpacho Demon pulls her into a dark room, from which a noise that sounds suspiciously like that annoying THX ad emenates (presumably, she would have ended her sentence with "the Transformers franchise"). Then, the other nun hangs herself in order to save herself from the Gazpacho Demon (which, although I definitely sympathize with her revulsion towards soup, doesn't seem the most Catholic thing a nun could do in that situation).

Smash cut to a guy who is definitely a drug dealer that wandered on set, who seems mildly upset that he has seen a dead nun.

We are then treated to a scene where a nun is playing with toy dinosaurs in a class room. She seems to have stolen them from some nerd kid. One of the kids says that dinosaurs are a conspiracy theory (which I don't recall hearing about in CCD) and the whole class agrees that God's kind of an asshole. A priest summons her. Then we are treated to a series of confusing smash cuts (they like their smash cuts in this movie) involvind drug dealer dude, who makes about 12 passes at the nun. The nun, priest, and Guy Ritchie character decide to explore the convent-- a building which nobody seems to have ever been in, despite the fact that it was an active convent. They are shocked to find spooky things. These include zombie nuns who wander aimlessly. They look a bit like someone trying to find the right cheese at Kroger's. The drug dealer steals a cross from a cemetary (which is probably not advisable when fighting demon nuns). The priest is attacked to a vomit snake (a close relative of the shitweasel from Dream Catcher), but, happily, has already paid for his burial.

At this point, the movie decides to set the world record for most camera shots panning over sinister shadowy figures, Hammer Horror cliches, and smash cuts. Oh, and the random demon zombie nuns, who really get annoying after a while (although one does do a pretty good Marx Brothers tribute act).

In all, it's a great movie to watch if... you are terrified by some nuns, but not by others, and are really unclear as to what it is that nuns do in the first place.

Still better than Return of the Exorcist, though, so there's that.

This has strangely not archived.

So, y'all get another review in the same thread. Huzzah?!

STRIKE COMMANDO:
No, it's not that new video game your cousin got. It's a Bruno Mattei movie.
Yes, it is yet another in a long line of his movies that makes you ask "didn't I see this movie before? And wasn't it better?" This is the man who brought us RoboWAR, CRUEL Jaws, and Terminator II. Yup. He literally called one of his movies Terminator II. It was a blatant rip-off of Alien. He also did Night Killer, which wasn't so much a rip-off as an awful film.

But Strike Commando is different. After all, it's name isn't a blatant rip-off of a blockbuster. Astonishingly, the man who gave us such films as Mondo Cannibal and Libidomania has learned to handle films in a capable way, respectable way.

The above was a blatant lie, of course. Within one minute and thirty seconds, a black character gives an anecdote about how he used to climb fences to steal watermelons back when he lived in Alabama as our heroes infiltrate what is presumably a North Vietnamese prison camp (even though I don't think the NVA used trailer parks in their prison camps). I also don't think the NVA were issued US-manufactured machine guns. Hell, maybe these assholes were just attacking a community theater production of "Miss Saigon".

Anyways, Reb Brown and his friend Stereotype Black attack this shitty compound, and it all goes to hell when it is revealed that the NVA have access to rape whistles. The black guy dies, and then a bunch of other Americans blow up the trailer park with a claymore mine that sounds like a child's laser gun toy.

Things get more bizzare as Reb Brown finds a village of mud-mask wearing Vietnamese who seem to worship American foreign policy (although I think the creepy old guy reveals that they are some weird mixture of Catholics and Donald Duck worshippers), informs his superiors that his dead friends generally demand vengeance via radio. Then it just turns into weird Rambo. Oh, I almost forgot-- Reb's character is named "Ransom".

One memorable scene involves Ransom being forced to cross a half-miler rice paddy by himself under heavy North Vietnamese fire. I don't just mean 3 guys with pistols. There is an RPG, three mortars, and a platoon of guys armed with AKs. They all miss, because they forgot to compensate for the fact that he was not standing still*.

In all, it's a great movie to watch if you are in the mood for Rambo, but you're too drunk to realize that you put in the wrong DVD.

*There's an Ole Miss joke to be made there.