ALIEN: COVENANT (2017) – Balladeer’s Blog’s sources in the industry – and by the industry I mean the business – have assured me that when the very first public showing of Alien: Covenant was over Ridley Scott stood up, faced the preview audience and defiantly said “Now you tell me that’s not funny!”
Turns out there’s a little Mel Brooks lurking inside Ridley Scott, who decided to do to his own Alien and Prometheus films what Brooks did to Star Wars with his Space Balls movie. Looked at in that light Alien: Covenant is pure comedy gold!
Remember how in Alien an interstellar crew gets detoured to a deadly site by a coded distress signal that’s really a warning? Well, in Alien: Covenant an interstellar crew gets detoured to a deadly site by a broadcast of THE JOHN DENVER SONG COUNTRY ROADS, TAKE ME HOME! Hilarious, right? Sure, it’s a little derivative of the aliens in Mars Attacks getting killed by Slim Whitman songs but c’mon, cut Ridley some slack!
Director Scott even takes a not-so-subtle poke at the whole “Newt and Hicks die right off the bat in Alien 3″ debacle. He has reasonably famous actor James Franco play the ship’s captain and – get this – Franco’s character dies after about a minute and a half when his cryo-sleep coffin catches fire! Too funny! (But I feel the merchandising tie-in with James Franco Briquettes is a little tasteless!)
And remember how we all laughed during Prometheus when the crew all took their helmets off on an alien body as if it was perfectly okay? Well this time around Ridley Scott has the crew NOT EVEN BOTHER TO WEAR HELMETS IN THE FIRST PLACE! They just traipse blithely about as if they’d never even HEARD of Security Protocols.
(We know that they have heard of them because sly ol’ funny man Ridley has these dweebs refer to them at one point in the ultimate example of irony. I mean it, dude, not even Leslie Nielsen could have delivered the reference to Security Protocols any more straight-faced than these folks! ) Continue reading
THE COMIC (1985) – Virtually every film buff today knows the tale of Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert raising money from doctors, grocers and dentists in Michigan to finance their subsequent horror hit The Evil Dead. 
The Comic takes place “in another place and another time” according to one of the female characters. From appearances it’s a near-future police state in which fairly ambiguous laws are enforced by goose-stepping goons who wear their hair in ponytails. This film seems to be reaching for the heights achieved in cult films like Eraserhead and Café Flesh but falls so far short that it’s more like The Jar. 
THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE (1979) – Category: Brucesploitation with an enjoyably absurd twist. 
PSYCHO GOTHIC LOLITA (2010) – Also available under the title Gothic & Lolita Psycho, this ultra-violent and blood-soaked movie was Japanese filmmaker Go Ohara’s follow-up to Geisha Assassin from 2008. 
Umbrellas are essential to Goth women to block out the sun and keep their skin pale, so Yuki makes a virtue out of fashion necessity by wielding high-tech bumbershoots that have razor-sharp points, shoot bullets like a machine-gun, are bullet-proof themselves and are stronger than steel. Burgess Meredith, eat your heart out!
BEGOTTEN (1990) – Written and directed by E. E. Merhige, this black and white art film runs 72 minutes. Merhige later directed Shadow of the Vampire, a surreal horror movie about the making of the silent film Nosferatu. 
I like Begotten but if I was doing a promo blurb for it I would avoid its director’s lofty tagline and instead use something like “It begins with God committing suicide … Then it gets weird.” 
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